
Class _Jd£M2£_ 

Book ,VV932._ 

Copyright^ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSfT. 




WE BREATHE THE HOT All:, IIKAVY WITH THE SMELL OF FRESH SOIL, AND 
THE SWEAT DRIPS FROM oi'K FACES UPON THE DAMP CLAY. 



THE WORKERS 



AN 



EXPERIMENT IN REALITY 



BY 



/ 



WALTEE A. WYCKOFF 

LECTURER ON SOCIOLOGY IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



THE EAST 



NEW YORK 

CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1897 




I if \„ M, t ™ COPIES RECEIVED 



v^ 



% *^ 



) I 3 



V*- 



Copyright, 1896, 1897, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



TO 



CHANNING F. MEEK, Esq. 



PREFACE 

The preface to a narrative like this must it- 
self be of the nature of a story which will ac- 
count for the expedition here described, and 
make clear the point of view from which the 
experiment was tried. 

Enough of the actual setting of the tale is 
implied in a passing reference to a charming 
country-seat on Long Island Sound, and the 
presence there of a fellow-guest, Mr. Channing 
F. Meek — a chance acquaintance to me then. 
His wide knowledge of the West, his intimate 
familiarity with practical affairs, and his catho- 
lic sympathy with human nature, made him a 
man wholly new and interesting to me. And in 
our talk, which drifted early into channels of 
social questions, I could but feel increasingly 
the difference between my slender, book-learned 
lore and his vital knowledge of men and the 

principles by which they live and work. 

vii 



Vlll PREFACE 

One radiant Sunday morning in midsummer 
there came to me from his talk so strong a sug- 
gestion of the means of acquiring the practical 
knowledge that I lacked, and in a way that gave 
promise of an experiment so interesting, and of 
such high possibility of successful treatment, 
that in that hour I knew that I was pledged to 
its undertaking. 

No further disclosure of my animus is needed 
than has already been hinted at in the fact of 
a new, unoccupied, inviting field and the fair 
prospect which its development offered to a 
student eager for a place among original investi- 
gators. I cannot, however, sufficiently acknowl- 
edge my indebtedness to the friends whose gen- 
erous sympathy has followed me throughout the 
enterprise — especially that friend already men- 
tioned. To him I owe the first idea of the plan 
and a large measure of what success has at- 
tended its execution. 

The narrative form into which I have cast 
the results of my investigation depends for its 
value solely upon careful adherence to the truth 
of actual experience. This account is strictly 
accurate even to details ; apart from confessed 
changes in the names of the persons introduced, 



PEEFACE ix 

no element of fiction has intentionally been al- 
lowed to intrude. 

It only remains to say with reference to my 
attitude in the experiment itself, that I entered 
upon it with no theories to establish and no 
conscious preconceptions to maintain. As sin- 
cerely as I could, I wished my mind to be tabula 
rasa to new facts, and sensitive to the impres- 
sions of actual experience. 

Princeton University, October 27, 1897. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Adjustment, 1 

CHAPTER II 
A Day-laborer at West Point, . . 33 

CHAPTER III 
A Hotel Porter, 78 

CHAPTER IV 
A Hired Man at an Asylum, • 108 

CHAPTER V 
A Farm Hand, 144 

CHAPTER VI 
In a Logging Camp, 179 

CHAPTER VII 
In a Logging Camp {Concluded), . . .225 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

We Breathe the Hot Air, Heavy with the 
Smell op Fresh Soil, and the Sweat 
Drips from our Faces upon the Damp 
Clay, Frontispiece 

PACING 
PAGE 

I Easily Passed Unnoticed in the Crowd, 24 

A Weird Procession, this Fragment of a 
Company in the Ranks of Labor, ... 48 

I Held my Peace, and Respectfully 
Touched my Cap, Inwardly Calling Her 
the Beauty that She Was, 94 

The Men were Rising from their Seats, 
and the Air was Full of Welcome, . . 216 



THE WORKERS 

CHAPTER I 

THE ADJUSTMENT 

Highland Falls, N. Y., 
Monday, July 27, 1891. 

The boss at the work on the old Academic 
building in West Point gave me a job this morn- 
ing, and ordered me to come to work to-morrow 
at seven o'clock. A gang of laborers is fast re- 
moving the old building, which is to give place 
to a new one. From one of the workmen I 
learned that the men live in Highland Falls, a 
mile down the river, and so I came here in search 
of a boarding-house. There was some difficulty 
in finding quarters, for the place is crowded with 
workingmen attracted here by the new build- 
ings at the Post and work on the railway. 

Mrs. Flaherty has taken me in as a boarder. 
That is not her name, but it sufficiently indi- 
cates her. She came to the door with the odor 
of soap-suds and boiling cabbage strong upon 



2 THE WORKERS 

her, and told me at first that she guessed that 
she couldn't take me. She relented when I ex- 
plained that I had work at the Post ; and, hav- 
ing admitted me as a member of her household, 
she gave play to her natural hospitality. When 
I was shown to a little carpetless room under 
the roof, with two double beds in it, I spoke of 
needing water, and she showed me where I could 
get a plentiful supply. I said that I should like 
to write, and she at once invited me from the 
torrid heat of the attic to a place at her dining- 
room table. 

Here then, in the temporary security of a 
boarding-house, and as an assigned member of 
the industrial army, I can review the first week 
of enlisted service. 

I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem, 
and am trying to learn by experience ; but I 
am so far familiar with Socialistic writings as 
to know that, from their point of view, I have 
not gone from one economic class into another. 
I belong to the proletariat, and from being one 
of the intellectual proletarians, I am simply be- 
come a manual proletaire. In other words, I 
no longer stand in the market ready to sell what 
mental ability I have, I now bring to the mar- 
ket instead my physical capacity for work ; and 
I sell that at its market price. Expressed in 



THE ADJUSTMENT 3 

every-day language, the change is simply this : 
from earning a living as a teacher, I have begun 
to earn it as an unskilled laborer. 

But, nevertheless, the change has in it ele- 
ments of real contrast. One week ago I shared 
the frictionless life of a country-seat. Friction- 
less, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate 
system which ministers luxuriously to the phys- 
ical needs of life. Frictionless, perhaps, only to 
those to whom it ministers. Now I am out of 
all that, and am sharing instead the life of the 
humblest form of labor upon which that super- 
structure rests. 

This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment 
to daily needs — very much the reverse. And 
whatever may be its compensations, they are 
not of the nature of easy physical existence. 

The actual step from the one manner of life 
to the other was sure of its own interest. It 
was painful to say good-by on the last evening, 
and there was enough of uncertainty in the 
prospect to account for a shrinking from the 
first encounter with a strange life ; but there 
was promise of adventure, and almost a certain- 
ty of solid gain in experience. 

At sunrise on the next morning I was ready 
to set out. I descended quietly to the hall. 
The butler stood there, politely urging some 



4 THE WOEKEKS 

pretended necessity as excuse for so early an 
appearance, and he invited me to breakfast. 

Often had he seen me off for a day's fishing 
or shooting in the old suit which I wore, but 
I could feel his eye fixed upon me now with 
perplexed interest. He had heard my expedi- 
tion discussed at the table, and in some vague 
way he took in that I meant to earn my living 
as a workman. With his wonted dignity, he 
helped me adjust my pack and strap it; and 
then he stood under the porte cochere, and 
watched me hurry across the lawn in the direc- 
tion of the highway. 

Two hours' walk carried me beyond the point 
of my acquaintance with the country roads ; but 
this presented no real difficulty, for I had but to 
keep a steadily westward course. Other details 
of my expedition were not so simple, and I be- 
gan to have an uncomfortable sense of unsus- 
pected difficulty. I look back from the vantage- 
point of a week's experience, with a feeling of 
amused tolerance, upon my naive preconcep- 
tions. It is like a retrospect of years. My no- 
tion of earning a living by manual labor was the 
securing of an odd job whenever I should need 
a meal or a night's lodging. Much advice had 
come my way before I set out. As a means of 
access to people, I was told to take with me a 



THE ADJUSTMENT 

book or magazine, and to invite subscriptions. I 
adopted this plan ; and a copy of a magazine 
was under my arm as I walked on through the 
dust and heat of the country road, wondering 
how long it would take me to reach the Hud- 
son, and how I should earn my first meal. 

There was nothing at all adventurous or ex- 
citing in a dusty walk. My pack was taking on 
increments of weight with each mile of the jour- 
ney. I was beginning to feel conscious of 
change in unexpected ways. There was no 
money in my pocket, and a most subtle and un- 
manning insecurity laid hold of me as a result 
of that. The world had curiously changed in 
its attitude, or rather I saw it at a new angle, 
and I felt the change most keenly in the bear- 
ing of people. My good-morning was not in- 
frequently met by a vacant stare, and if I stopped 
to ask the way, the conviction was forced upon 
me that, as a pack-pedler, I was a suspicious 
character, with no claim upon common consid- 
eration. 

In the shade of his porch sat the keeper of a 
country store, at a fork of the road. His chair 
was tilted against the outer wall, and his feet 
rested upon the balustrade. My question as to 
the course of the two roads before me was re- 
sponded to by the merchant, first with a look, 



6 THE WORKERS 

and then a spurt of tobacco-juice, which, stirred 
the dust between my feet, and, finally, a caustic 
sentence to the effect that he 'did not much 
know, and did not care a damn,' while his blue 
eyes swept the horizon, and rested finally on the 
Sound, gleaming golden in the morning sun, and 
the purple line of the Long Island shore. 

The new-born self -consciousness which I found 
asserting itself was like a wound on the hand, 
exposed to constant injury. I had walked sev- 
eral miles before I summoned courage to speak 
to anyone else. Finally, very hot and thirsty, 
I knocked at the door of an unpainted cottage 
which stood on the road. The door opened to 
the touch of an old woman, who bent toward me 
in the emaciated angularity of a decrepit figure 
which must once have been strikingly tall and 
vigorous. 

I asked leave to show her the magazine, and 
she invited me into the cool of her home. The 
middle floor was covered with a yellow oil-cloth, 
on which there stood a table. A large cooking- 
stove occupied one side of the room. A few 
wooden-bottom chairs were ranged around the 
walls. An old kitchen clock rested on the man- 
tel-shelf ; and on either side of it hung a faded 
photograph, each in an oval wooden frame. 

The old woman asked me to draw up a chair 



THE ADJUSTMENT 7 

to the table, and she sat beside me, looking with 
the excited interest of a child at the pictures 
which I showed her, but paying little heed, I 
thought, to what I was saying. Presently, with- 
out warning, she veered mentally with the facility 
of childhood, and now she was looking at me in- 
tently between the eyes, while one long skeleton 
hand lay on the open page before her. 

"Be you a pedler ?" she asked, and her eyes 
dilated to the measure of the protruding sockets 
over which the yellow skin was tightly drawn. 

" I am trying to get subscribers for this mag- 
azine," I told her. 

" Was you raised in these parts ? " 

My negative gave her the opening for which she 
was unconsciously feeling. She was born and 
" raised " on that spot, and had lived there for 
nearly eighty years, and she hastened to tell me 
so. There was nothing voluble in the recital of 
her history, only a directness and simplicity of 
speech and a certain quiet reserve which ren- 
dered the narrative absorbing to us both. Some 
bond of sympathy began to make itself felt, for 
she was dwelling on the losses of her life, and, 
quite unconsciously, she wept as she told me of 
the death of one and another, until not one of all 
her family or kindred was left to her, except her 
grandson, with whom she now lived. She said 



8 THE WORKERS 

no word of complaint ; and, in the presence of 
her human sorrows, she had no memory of pov- 
erty, and of the bitter struggle against want 
which life had plainly been for her. She was 
sobbing softly, with her head bent upon the ta- 
ble, when she ceased speaking, and no comfort 
that I could offer her was comparable to the 
relief that she felt in telling her story. When 
I arose to go, she was breathing deeply, like a 
comforted child. 

For a stretch of several miles of country road 
I spurred myself to knock at every door to 
which I came. My reception was curiously uni- 
form. I never got beyond the request for leave 
to show the magazine. The reply was invari- 
ably a negative ; sometimes polite, but always 
emphatic. Once I did not get so far as that. 
A portly negress saw me approaching her cot- 
tage from the road, and, standing strident on 
guard before her door, she shouted to me across 
the meadow that nothing was wanted there, and 
that I might save myself the walk. 

It was nearing noon, and I was very hungry. 
The question of earning a meal was no longer an 
interesting speculation, but a pressing necessity. 
I turned all my attention to that. A large iron 
gateway leading into a cemetery attracted me. 
Several ragged, tow-headed children were playing 



THE ADJUSTMENT 9 

about the lodge. One of them told me that his 
father was inside, and he indicated the general 
direction of the tomb-stones. I found the dig- 
ger sweating freely in a half -finished grave, 
and instantly offered my help as a means of 
earning a dinner. The grave-digger was an 
Irishman. He leaned at ease upon his spade, 
and soberly looked me over, and then declined 
my offer. He was polite, but not at all com- 
municative, and he met my advances with the 
one remark that his " old woman " was not at 
home. 

A little farther on, I saw three women in pur- 
suit of a hen. I eagerly volunteered my help, 
and asked for a dinner in payment. They quit 
the chase, and stood confronting me with serious 
faces, while I eloquently pleaded my readiness 
to help them. Nothing in the situation seemed 
to strike them as strange or irregular, but they 
touched upon it with short, grave speech, until 
I had the feeling of something momentous, and 
I accepted their refusal with a sense of relief. 

At last, in the outskirts of the village of West- 
port, I found a man mowing his lawn, and he 
was willing to give me a dinner for completing 
the work. My final success in getting an odd 
job was a splendid stimulus. I urged the mower 
over the lawn with a vigor that surprised me, 



10 THE WORKERS 

and the dinner which I ate in the dim corner of 
an immaculate kitchen was a liberal return for 
the labor. 

All that long summer afternoon I went from 
house to house, asking subscriptions for the 
magazine. The rack would have been easier 
upon my feelings, but I was eager to discover 
some ready way of approaching people. Not 
even the loafers at the station were in the least 
inclined to share their company with me. At 
nightfall I earned, by sawing wood for an hour, 
a supper and the right to sleep in an unused 
barn. 

When I awoke, in the early morning, I looked 
with bewilderment at the dull gray light that 
shone between the parted boards and through 
the rifts among the shingles. I came to myself 
with homesickness in full possession of me, and 
my back aching from the pressure of that intol- 
erable pack. At the pump in the barn-yard I 
washed myself, and sat down to eat a slice of 
cold meat and some pieces of bread which I had 
saved from supper. An unfriendly collie watched 
me, and growled threateningly until I won him 
over with a share of the breakfast. 

The village was muffled in a heavy, clinging 
fog. The buoyancy of the previous morning 
was gone. It was with some difficulty that I 



THE ADJUSTMENT 11 

found the road which had been pointed out to 
me as the shortest cut across country to the 
Hudson. I could not shake off the feeling of 
homelessness and isolation ; and, under its in- 
fluence, the lot of the farmers' boys, whom I met 
driving their carts to early market, appeared in- 
finitely to be desired. A life of any honest 
work which accounts for one, and includes some 
human fellowship, and a reasonable certainty of 
food and shelter, began to take on undreamed-of 
attractiveness, in contrast with vagrancy. I felt 
outside of the true order of things, and as hav- 
ing no contact with any vital current of the 
world. Perhaps it was in some measure the 
Philistine in me asserting himself, in the absence 
of his customary bath and hot coffee ; for, as the 
fog lifted and the sun appeared, I came upon a 
brook which I had only to follow a hundred 
yards or more to a well-shaded pool, where the 
bath was soon achieved, and I emerged feeling 
that a vagrant life, with some purpose in it, was, 
after all, rather desirable. 

The morning was only fairly begun when I 
reached the village of Wilton, eight miles from 
Westport. Already I was tired, and certain 
muscles of the shoulders and back were in violent 
revolt. I left my pack at the post-office. Pass- 
ing up a street, which runs at right angles to 



12 THE WORKERS 

the one by which I entered the village, I pres- 
ently knocked at the last of a row of comfortable 
cottages. 

When the door opened I knew instinctively 
that the gentleman who stood framed in it was 
the village pastor. I said that I was looking for 
work. He asked me inside. I thought this a 
curious change of subject, but willingly followed 
him into a dim sitting-room, fragrant of perfect 
cleanliness. I explained that I was on my way 
to West Point in search of work, but was with- 
out money, and so obliged to earn my living by 
the way, and that I would gladly do anything 
that offered in payment for bread and board. He 
questioned me closely, with an evident purpose 
of drawing me out further, and then he abruptly 
offered me work on his wood-pile, and appeared 
surprised at my instant agreement. 

The wood was green, and the saw, with which 
it had first to be cut into proper lengths, was 
not sharp, and it was certainly not skilfully 
handled. The work was hard, but at noon there 
was ready for me in the shed, a dinner of beef, 
and potatoes, and slices of bread, which for 
lightness and color were like flakes of snow, 
held by a band of crisp brown crust. 

In the afternoon the minister interrupted my 
work with the request that I would join him in 



THE ADJUSTMENT 13 

the house, and he indicated where I could first 
wash in the wood-shed. I steeled myself for a 
lecture on the evils of vagrancy, with incidental 
references to drunkenness as its probable cause 
in my case. Instead, I found the family seated 
for an early " tea," and myself invited to a place 
at the table. I am bound to say that I was 
rattled. I had expected a meal in the kitchen, 
and a bed in common with the preacher's horse. 

Not the least curious position in which I have 
so far been placed, was that which I occupied at 
the minister's board. His family, I shrewdly 
suspect, did not share his hospitable feelings 
toward me, and I could venture a guess that it 
was under protest from them that I took a seat 
next to the minister's daughter. 

She was a pale, delicate girl, of seventeen, 
perhaps. Her short, brown hair curled close to 
her head, and her dark eyes looked dimly at you 
through huge spectacles. The light, crisp stuff 
in which she was dressed seemed to create about 
her an atmosphere some degrees cooler than 
that of the rest of the room. 

By way of beginning, I offered some fatuous 
commonplace about the surrounding country. 
Instantly I realized that I was not to venture 
upon a conversation that implied terms of social 
equality. The child bristled with outraged dig- 



14 THE WOEKEES 

nity, and let fall in reply a sharp monosyllable. 
Further conversation with her would have been 
highly diverting, but not very considerate, 
and so I turned to my host, who maintained 
through the meal the air of one who is on the 
defensive, but who is sustained by the convic- 
tion of doing his duty. 

My sympathies were all with the girl. Her 
feeling was very natural — so natural as to sug- 
gest the rather disturbing ideas with which 
Count Tolstoi is again confronting us. It was a 
very practical application of the teaching of 
brotherhood, that of asking a chance workman 
to a seat at one's family table. But if minister- 
ing to Him is really, in part, in such recogni- 
tions of the least of His brethren, the instinctive 
shrinking of the girl brought up in a Christian 
home in the country was a commentary on our 
drift from the simplicities of the Gospel. 

In the evening I went with the minister to a 
prayer-meeting in his church. A handful of 
people sat at solemn intervals in the audience- 
room. I was plainly the only common laborer 
among them. The men appeared to be com- 
fortable farmers, and there was a village shop- 
keeper or two, while the women were clearly 
their wives and daughters. 

In one of the agitating silences which fell 



THE ADJUSTMENT 15 

upon the company after the minister had de- 
clared the meeting open, I rose and took part ; 
and at the door, when the benediction had dis- 
missed us, several of the men spoke to me cor- 
dially. There was entire kindliness in their 
manner, and they, perhaps, were not conscious 
of showing surprise in welcoming a laborer to 
their meeting. 

That night the minister insisted upon my tak- 
ing a bed in his house. I pleaded an early start. 
He, too, was to be up early, and in the morning 
I found him in the kitchen before me. On the 
table were bread and milk ; and as I ate I par- 
ried the somewhat searching questions of my 
host. 

My course from Wilton lay through Eidge- 
field and Salem and Golden's Bridge, and then, 
crossing the line between Connecticut and New 
York, it made directly for the Hudson River. 

This was no great distance ; but in the early 
stages of the march I was much delayed by 
rains. Driven to shelter, I found it usually in a 
barn, or a shed under which were housed the 
farming implements. Here is an example : 
From a sudden downpour of rain I ran to an 
open barn. A farmer, whom I found there un- 
hitching his horses, eyed me suspiciously, and 
gave a halting assent to my request for shelter. 



16 THE WORKERS 

He soon left me alone. I tried to read, and 
could not. The dull day was deeply depressing. 
Like the burden of a haunting sorrow the trial 
of separation weighed upon me. It was not 
homesickness alone, but added to that a feeling 
of isolation. Poverty, I had thought, would at 
once bring me into vital contact with the very 
poor. Instead, it had made me an object of un- 
failing distrust. The very poor I found in an 
occasional cottage of a farm laborer, or some 
grotesquely dilapidated hovel, swarming with 
negro life. But they were no more hospitable 
to my approach than were the well-to-do farm- 
ers, and I met not a single vagrant like myself 
in the course of my walk to the Hudson. I was 
lonely with the loneliness of a castaway, and I 
climbed into the hay-loft and fell asleep. Here, 
at least, was comfort ; the deep, dreamless sleep, 
to which I had long been a stranger, was mak- 
ing gracious advances. "When I awoke, the rain 
was past for the time, and I resumed my jour- 
ney, with a leaden sky overhead, and soft, cling- 
ing mud under foot; but I was strangely re- 
freshed, and walked on quite enheartened. 

The intermittent rains interfered with my 
progress, and increased the difficulty of finding 
chance work. Eepeatedly I was offered a meal, 
but denied the privilege of working for it. For 



THE ADJUSTMENT 17 

twenty-four hours I went hungry, and spent 
much of that time asleep in a hole which I bur- 
rowed into a hay-stack. 

But under a brightening sky on Friday, I was 
given some wood to chop, and the promise of a 
dinner in payment. 

The work was soon done, and to the dinner 
there was given an added pleasure in the com- 
pany of one of the two old women for whom I 
chopped the wood. She sat at the table and 
talked to me. Perhaps she was solicitous for 
her spoons. Certainly she was very entertaining. 
Her dark calico dress fitted closely her thin fig- 
ure ; and she sat very straight in her chair, with 
her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes bright 
with gentle benignity. 

In all the farming region through which I 
have passed on my way to the Hudson, I have 
been much impressed by an unlooked-for qual- 
ity in the intelligence of the people. The books, 
of which I now and then caught glimpses in 
their homes, were often of a surprising range. 
On the sitting-room table of one farm-house I 
noticed a Milton, and several volumes of Emer- 
son, and a copy of Stevenson's Essays, besides 
much current literature. Not infrequently the 
conversation of these people had in it a curious 
suggestion of cultivation, curious only because 
2 



18 THE WORKERS 

a dainty choice of words, and the graceful turn 
of a phrase were accompanied by habitual inac- 
curacies of speech. They have, for example, 
their own forms of the verb " to be. " " I be " 
and " You be " are invariable in their common 
usage. I wondered whether the conventional 
forms which they find in their reading did not 
strike them as oddly foreign. 

The prim little lady who sat near me through 
my dinner proved charming. She showed no 
curiosity about my history, nor the least anxiety 
to tell me hers. With an air of quiet self-pos- 
session she followed the conversation into its 
natural channels, and sometimes followed it far ; 
for at one time she was describing for me, with 
admirable vividness, the methods of irrigation 
in use in Colorado. But she consistently made 
done do duty for did, and she used, in some of 
her sentences, negatives enough to satisfy the 
needs of negation in the purest of Attic speech. 

One more incident of the tramp to the Hud- 
son : Late on Friday afternoon I was nearing 
Golden's Bridge, a village on the Harlem divis- 
ion of the New York Central Bailroad. My 
road lay over the hills of a rolling farm-region. 
The fields of corn were radiant with sunlight re- 
flected from great drops of rain which rested on 
the nodding blades. In the meadows was the 



THE ADJUSTMENT 19 

rich sheen of the after-growth. Golden-rod and 
sumach grew thick on the roadside, and half 
concealed the rails of the zigzag fences. From 
the forest there came a breath of fragrant cool- 
ness. 

After sundown the twilight soon faded into 
dark. My efforts to secure further work had 
been unsuccessful. Once I was nearing the ruin 
of a little wooden cottage, on the porch of which 
sat a woman enjoying the cool of the evening. 
Upon seeing me enter the gate she fled within, 
and slammed the door; and I heard the key 
turn in the lock. I was growing tired. The 
actual journey had not carried me far, but the 
long fast of the previous day and the toilsome 
walking over soft roads had resulted in exhaus- 
tion. Scarcely physical strength remained with 
which to move farther, and I was ready to throw 
myself down, with infinite relief, under any 
chance shelter, when I caught sight of the vil- 
lage lights not a quarter of a mile beyond. 

I knocked at the first door on the street. A 
farmer's wife appeared, and kindly offered to 
consult her husband on the subject of work. 
She soon returned with a favorable reply, and 
invited me to follow her into the kitchen. Car- 
petless as it was, and stained as to walls and 
ceiling, and low, and dimly lighted, the shelter 



20 THE WORKERS 

of that room was like softest luxury. A pitcher 
of milk and some slices of bread were placed on 
the table, and I ate ravenously. 

At one end of the table sat the farmer in his 
shirt-sleeves, with a newspaper spread before 
him. He was in the midst of his haying, he 
said, and had plenty of work, and was willing 
enough that I should join the other men in the 
hay-field. The shed for the hands was full, so 
I offered to go to the barn, and was soon fast 
asleep on the loose hay in a stall. 

As the farmer and I walked to the barn, I had 
taken occasion to fortify myself in the agree- 
ment regarding work. He was an old man, very 
hale and hearty and genial, and he walked with 
a curiously stiff movement of the legs, and with 
his feet nearly at right angles to the line of prog- 
ress. He set my mind at rest with the assur- 
ance that there would be plenty of work for me, 
if the morning proved good. 

The morning was all that could be desired. I 
got up early, and went to the kitchen, where an 
Irish maid-of-all-work gave me a bit of soap and 
some water in a tin basin, with which to finish 
my preparation for breakfast. She was a beau- 
tiful girl, large and awkward and ill-groomed ; 
but her features were strikingly handsome, and 
her clear, rich complexion would of itself have 



THE ADJUSTMENT 21 

constituted a claim to beauty, while sprays of 
golden hair fell in effective curls about her fore- 
head, and heightened the charm of her deep-set 
Celtic blue eyes. I was drying my face and 
hands on a coarse towel which hung on a roller 
near the kitchen-door, and which was used in 
common by all of the hired men. She watched 
me curiously. Presently she ventured an in- 
quiry as to whether " the boss " had given me 
" a job." I said that he had. " Her eyes were 
homes " of deep concern, and in her voice was 
that note of pity so effective in the Celtic ac- 
cent. She was saying that my hands did not 
look as though I was used to work. I was 
blushingly conscious that my hands were against 
me, but she tactfully tried to relieve the situ- 
ation by supposing that I was a "tradesman." 
Then had to come the damaging confession that 
I was not. But the other hired men now began 
to enter, and we sat down to breakfast. 

A breakfast on a farm is not always the appe- 
tizing reality that the inexperienced imagination 
paints. The cloth, in this case, was ragged, and 
showed signs of long use since its last washing, 
and there were no napkins. The service was 
repulsive in its hideous tastelessness. Flies 
swarmed in the room, and crowded one another 
into our food. The men were in their working 



22 THE WOEKEES 

clothes, coatless, sleeves rolled up, and their be- 
grimed shirts open at the neck. "When our 
coffee was poured out and handed to us, each 
used his own spoon in dipping sugar from a 
bowl which was passed from hand to hand. 
The butter, in a half -melting condition, and 
dark with imprisoned flies, was within reach of us 
all, and each helped himself with his knife, and 
then used it in conveying food to his mouth. 
This last feat I did not try. There was in it a 
suggestion of necromancy, and I had doubts of 
my success. We ate in silence, as though the 
gravity of the occasion was beyond speech. The 
farmer did not appear until we had finished 
breakfast, and I waited at the kitchen-door for 
orders from him. 

He came at last, kind and cordial as ever, but 
quite changed in purpose regarding my going 
to work. He urged my confessed inexperience, 
and the danger of exposure to the sun. I pro- 
tested my willingness to assume the risks, and 
begged to be allowed at least to work for what 
had been given me. But he would not listen, 
and appeared to think that he set matters right 
by assuring me repeatedly that to what I had 
received I was " perfectly welcome." His wife 
gave me, at parting, some tracts, and a religious 
newspaper, and in these I found presented, in 



THE ADJUSTMENT 23 

somewhat lurid light, the evil consequences of 
insobriety. 

Knowing that I was within walking distance 
of Garrisons-on-Hudson, I resolved to reach 
that point before night. My letters had been 
forwarded there, and my eagerness to get them 
was of a kind unexperienced before. It was Sat- 
urday, and, late in the afternoon, I reached Gar- 
risons after a hard day's march. The heat was 
intense, and although I walked but a little more 
than twenty miles, the effort of carrying my 
pack was thoroughly exhausting. The woman 
in charge at the post-office was in evident doubt 
about the safety of giving me so large a packet 
of letters, but yielded at sight of others which I 
showed her, and readily agreed to look after my 
pack until I should call for it. 

Between the station and the river was a tav- 
ern, and there I meant to apply for work. As I 
neared the station platform, a train from New 
York drew in. Something familiar in one of the 
passengers who alighted put me on my guard. 
In a moment I recognized a fellow-guest at a 
dinner-party of a few evenings before, and I re- 
membered, with an odd sense of another exist- 
ence, that, over our coffee, on a broad veranda, 
overlooking a harbor, bright with the night-lights 
of a squadron of yachts, he had given me the 



24 THE WOKKEKS 

benefit of an amazing familiarity with the de- 
tails of the recent baccarat scandal. My anxiety 
was needless, for I easily passed unnoticed in 
the crowd. 

I walked on to the tavern. Its keeper was 
busy behind the bar when I asked him for a job. 
He surprised me immensely with a ready prom- 
ise of work, and he asked me to wait until he 
could arrange matters. I went into an adjoin- 
ing room, and took out my letters. 

It was the pool-room, and the walls were hung 
with colored prints of prize-fighters, with arms 
folded on their bare chests in a way that put 
their biceps much in evidence. And there were 
pictures of race-horses which had won distinc- 
tion. An old, much-battered pool-table occu- 
pied the middle of the room. Around the walls 
ran a rough wooden bench. Dirt was every- 
where conspicuous. The ceiling and walls were 
filthy. The floor was bare and unswept, and 
there were accumulations of dust about the 
table-legs and in the corners under the benches, 
which could be accounted for only by a liberal 
allowance of time. The two small windows, 
through which one could see the dismal tavern 
yard, apparently had never been washed. 

I sat on a bench, and opened the letters. The 
dim past of my " respectable " life began to 




I KASHA' PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD. 



THE ADJUSTMENT 25 

brighten with increasing vividness. Quite lost 
to present surroundings, I was suddenly re- 
called to them by the appearance of the boss, 
who came with a cloth in hand, with which he 
aimlessly dusted the table while he questioned 
me. I was so absorbed in letters that, for a 
moment, I could not place myself, nor in the 
least account for the situation. The keeper was 
asking me what I could do. This was a natural 
question under the circumstances; but it took 
me by surprise, and it staggered me. I covered 
my confusion with a profession of willingness to 
be useful, and of a desire to work. The boss, a 
coarse, blear-eyed, sensuous-looking man, eyed 
me doubtfully, and suddenly concluded that he 
had no work for me. 

But I was wide awake now. I knew that the 
nearest farms were some miles back in the coun- 
try, and that, except at the tavern, I had slender 
chance of food or shelter. I said that if there 
was work to be done, I was eager to do it, and 
that if, after a trial, he found me incapable, he 
could dismiss me at any moment. 

I fancied that I had gained my point, for he 
told me to follow him, as he led the way into 
the kitchen. There we found the cook bend- 
ing over a range, in which the fire refused to 
burn. 



26 



THE WORKERS 



" Mrs. Murphy," said the boss, " here's a man 
I've hired to help Sam," and then he turned 
sharply upon me with a " Damn you now, work ! 
if you know how to work ! " 

My opportunity lay in the smouldering fire, 
so I hastened to the wood-pile, and presently 
returned with an armful of fine wood which 
insured a fire for dinner. 

Mrs. Murphy was a little, old, emaciated Irish 
woman, with her thin white hair parted in the 
middle, smoothed back, and twisted into a care- 
less knot on her crown. Her face was wrinkled 
almost to grotesqueness, and she had the passive 
air of one to whom can come no surprises of joy 
or sorrow, as though the capacity for sensation 
were gone, and life had reduced itself to mere ex- 
istence. I watched for opportunities of helping 
her, and she accepted the services as though she 
had been accustomed to them always. 

She began to interest me deeply. I learned 
from her that Sam, whom I was hired to help, 
was a scullion and stable boy. When she had 
nothing further for me to do in the kitchen, I 
returned to the wood-pile, and chopped indus- 
triously, hoping to give evidence of my fitness 
for the place. In an hour or more the propri- 
etor called me, intending, I supposed, to give 
me a change of work ; but, instead, he gave me 



THE ADJUSTMENT 27 

a quarter, and told rue, not unkindly, but firmly, 
that lie did not want me. 

The situation was discouraging. I had tramped 
some twenty miles through dust and heat over 
a hilly country, and since the early morning I 
had had nothing but a few apples to eat. Be- 
sides, it was fast growing dark, and so too late 
to look for work on the farms back in the coun- 
try. 

The immediate neighborhood is largely taken 
up with country-seats, and I made repeated ef- 
forts to get work at the hands of a gardener. I 
soon discovered that I was in a community 
where special provision is made against my 
class. At the carriage gates I not infrequently 
found a notice which warned me of the presence of 
dogs, and although the dogs gave me no trouble, 
a lodge-keeper, or footman, or gardener, upon 
learning my errand, was invariably seized with 
fervent anxiety for getting me unnoticed out of 
the grounds. 

At nightfall I walked back to the tavern, and 
asked the proprietor if I might sleep in his 
stables. To my surprise, he was exceedingly 
friendly. He readily agreed to that, and, of his 
own accord, he invited me to remain at the tav- 
ern over Sunday, and to take my meals in the 
kitchen ; and he added that, on Monday morn- 



28 THE WORKERS 

ing, lie would give me some work to do as com- 
pensation. 

Already I had made a friend of the cook, and 
she now received me warmly. Perhaps it was 
her habitual good-nature, for she had the same 
kindly manner toward the other men, Sam and 
the three Irish section hands from the railway, 
who took their meals with her. More than ever 
I was attracted to her. She cordially greeted 
the workmen as they entered her hot, reeking, 
ill-lit kitchen, addressing them by affectionate 
diminutives of their first names, as Johnnie and 
Jimmie and the like. They clearly had a warm 
regard for her, and they respectfully lowered 
their voices and said "ma'am" in addressing 
her. To be sure they swore viciously in her pres- 
ence ; but then she swore, too, not ill-naturedly, 
but simply as an habitual means of emphasizing 
her usual language. 

I watched her for some sign of ill-temper. In 
stifling quarters and under exasperating incon- 
veniences she toiled on at work far beyond her 
strength, not patiently merely, but with the 
cheerfulness which is always thoughtful of the 
comfort of others. 

In spite of fatigue, that night in the stable was 
not a restful one. The air lay heavy and hot in 
the unventilated loft, and through the night the 



THE ADJUSTMENT 29 

horses, tortured by flies, stamped ceaselessly in 
their stalls. About midnight two men came 
into the barn. I soon knew them for bedless 
wanderers like myself, and I awaited them in 
the hay with an interest that was lively. They 
did not climb to the loft, but lay down in a 
wagon ; and for an hour or more I heard their 
gruff voices in antiphonal sentences replete with 
strange oaths. They were speaking in low tones 
and not excitedly, but their speech seemed little 
else than profanity. 

The heat and darkness intensified the quiet of 
the night. The breathless stillness was broken 
only by the hoarse blasphemies below, and the 
nervous stamping of the pestered brutes. I 
tried to shut out the sounds, and at last fell 
asleep. 

In the early morning I awoke to a beautiful 
mid-summer Sunday, the first of my vagrant 
life. Sam was whistling at his work in the 
stables and the tramps were gone. I found a 
path behind the barn leading to a point on the 
river-bank where I could bathe. 

The military cadets were out on Sunday pa- 
rade, and the music of their band was the sum- 
mer morning itself, vocal in notes other than the 
songs of birds, and the soft murmur of the river. 
The tents of the camp shone spotlessly white on 



30 THE WOKKEKS 

the bluffs above the water. Some of the build- 
ings were visible among the trees. The sheer 
approach to the Post and its dark background 
of well- wooded highlands threw into strong re- 
lief its commanding position. Among the hills 
to the north the river appears. The immediate 
section of it might be a lake, girt with steep hills, 
that are dense with infinite shades of green. 
About the Post the river sweeps in a magnifi- 
cent curve, and disappears among the hills to 
the south. 

The few books that my pack contained made 
generous amends, on this day of rest, for the 
weight which they had added to my load. After 
breakfast I took one of them to a shaded corner 
of the church-yard, and read there until the 
service hour, and then I slipped into a seat half 
hidden by the baptismal font. 

In his sermon the rector contrasted the emas- 
culated ideas of the present with reference to 
God's judgment of sin, with the virile thinking 
of the Middle Ages, expressed in such works of 
art as Dante's Inferno, and Angelo's Last Judg- 
ment in the Sistine Chapel. Earnestly and elo- 
quently he pleaded the reality of spiritual things 
to the^minds of men in those ages of belief, and 
then he solemnly urged a return to the plain 
truths of inspiration, and to the teaching of the 



THE ADJUSTMENT 31 

Church, that "God cannot look upon sin with 
the least degree of allowance," and that the pun- 
ishment of unrepented evil is " eternal death." 

The church was well filled, and I looked it 
over with a quickened interest. The sexton 
and I, so far as I could see, were the only repre- 
sentatives of the poor. Outside were a number 
of coachmen and grooms and nurse-maids ; but 
these, it is likely, were of another persuasion. 
Certainly they would have looked curiously out 
of place to our Protestant eyes among that well- 
dressed, prosperous company. I knew this body 
of worshippers at a glance ; some of them I 
knew personally. It was easy to follow them all 
in imagination to country houses where the after- 
noon would be spent in what escape there offered 
from the heat. On the next day would be be- 
gun again the round of wholesome recreation 
and of social intercourse, relieved from the for- 
mality of town life, which makes up the summer 
rest, and which implies the leisure which is ren- 
dered possible only by the continuous work of a 
multitude of the poor, who constitute the parts 
of intricate social and domestic machinery. I 
seem to be dwelling upon a costly immunity 
from physical labor. It was not this that ap- 
pealed to me. These worshippers had leisure, 
but they were far from being idle. My personal 



32 THE W0EKEES 

acquaintance went far enough to recognize among 
them persons whose lives are full of strenuous 
activiby in channels of splendid usefulness. It 
was the social cleavage which yawned to my 
vision from the new point of view. The rich 
were there in the house of God, but not the 
poor; and the very atmosphere of the place 
seemed to preclude the presence of the poor. 

I had asked Sam to go to church with me. 
Sam had been watering the horses, and now had 
an empty bucket in each hand and some tobacco 
in his mouth. He stood still for a moment, re- 
garding me intently, and shifting the tobacco 
from one cheek to the other. Then he asked me 
with much directness if I took him for a "dude." 
I said that I should then go alone. "That 
way ? " asked Sam, with an eye to my gear. " It 
is the best that I can do," I explained. " Then 
go, and be fired for a bum," he replied, as he 
moved on toward the pump. 



CHAPTEE II 

A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 

Highland Falls, N. Y., 
Monday, August 3, 1891. 

At three o'clock on Saturday afternoon I de- 
cided to quit work on the old Academic build- 
ing. I went up to the boss and told him of my 
intention, as I had seen other men do, and was 
ordered into the office ; there, without a mo- 
ment's delay, the timekeeper's books were con- 
sulted, and No. 6 was paid the five dollars and 
eighty-five cents which were due him. Five dol- 
lars are gone to Mrs. Flaherty for board ; seven- 
ty-five cents more will be owing to her to-morrow 
morning for another day, and then I shall set 
out on the road with ten cents in my pocket. 

I had calculated upon a balance far in excess 
of that ; for when I went to work on Tuesday, 
five full working-days were before me, and, at a 
wage of one dollar and sixty cents, they were to 
yield an income of eight dollars. My reckon- 
ing left out the chance of rain. For three days 

passing showers drove us to cover, and the 
3 33 



34 THE WORKERS 

" called time " was as closed noted by the boss 
as it is by the referee in a foot-ball game ; only 
we were given no chance to make it up. 

Mrs. Flaherty's home has a real hold upon 
my affections. It is one in my mind with the 
blessed interludes of rest which were brief tran- 
sitions from one aeon of work to another. My 
acquaintance with the household covers a period 
of incalculable time. Mrs. Flaherty wears tow- 
ard me now a motherly air of possession ; and 
she wrinkles her brows in perplexed protest 
when I tell her that I am going away in the 
morning, with no knowledge of where I shall 
find another place ; and she wipes her mouth 
with the corner of her apron, and tells me, with 
increasing emphasis, that I'd better stay by my 
job, and let her care for me decently, and not go 
wandering about the country, and, as likely as 
not, come to harm. 

Her husband is a painter, a little round man 
with red hair and high spirits, who is a well- 
preserved veteran of the Civil War, and very 
fond of telling you of his life as a " recruitie." 

Minnie is their daughter. She inherits her 
father's hair, and gives promise of his rotundity. 
But just now Minnie is fifteen, and the world is 
a very interesting and exciting place. She took 
her first communion last Easter, and still wears 



A DAY-LABOKER AT WEST POINT 35 

her confirmation dress on Sundays, and is really 
pretty in a blushing effort to look unconscious 
when Charlie McCarthy calls. 

Charles appears regularly on Sunday after- 
noons, I gather. He is a driver for an ice- 
dealer, is not much older than Minnie, and is 
very proud of a light-gray suit and a pair of 
highly polished brown boots. 

Tom is Minnie's only brother. He is a stoker 
on a river-boat, and can spend only his Sundays 
at home. Tom is a little past his majority, and 
takes himself very seriously as a man. He tells 
you frankly that he is earning " big money/' 
and is anxious that you shall not escape the 
knowledge that he is a libertine. 

The child that he is came comically to the 
surface last night, with no least regard for the 
newly found dignity of manhood. Tom shares 
one of the beds in my room, and in the middle 
of the night he came bounding to the floor in 
a nightmare, and running to the door began 
pounding it with both hands, and screaming, 
" Papa ! Papa ! " like a child in a paroxysm of 
fear. He soon woke himself, and then he slunk 
into bed and was surly with us as we crowded 
about him, eager to know the cause of this vio- 
lent awaking. 

Jerry and Pete and Jim and Tom Wilson and 



36 THE WOKKEKS 

I are the boarders. Wilson's is the only stir- 
name that I know. Surnames are little in use 
on this level of society; they smack of a cer- 
tain formality like that which attaches to Sun- 
day clothes. We were all sitting on the porch 
after supper on my first evening, and I knew 
that the men were taking my measure. Jerry 
broke the silence with an abrupt inquiry after 
my name. I responded with my surname. 
Jerry took his pipe from his mouth, and turned 
to me with some warmth : " That's not what I 
want to know. What's your first name? What's 
a man to call you ? " " Oh, call me John," I 
said, with sudden inspiration, and I have passed 
as " John " accordingly. 

Wilson and I worked together at unskilled 
labor, and we have a bed in common ; and it 
was during a night of fearful heat, when neither 
of us could sleep, that Wilson, in a burst of 
confidence, told me his full name. 

I had noticed him as a new-comer on the 
works on Wednesday morning. He accepted 
the job with alacrity, and, in spite of evident 
physical weakness, he went to work with fever- 
ish energy. At noon hour we shared a dinner, 
and he told me that he had slept in the open 
for three nights running, and had had nothing 
to eat since the previous noon. I referred him 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 37 

to Mrs. Flaherty, and at supper I found him at 
a place at her table. 

It was that night that he gave me his confi- 
dence. Two years ago he came to America 
from the north of Ireland. From the first he 
had found it hard to get work, and he had never 
kept a job long. This was chiefly due, he said, 
to his having been brought up to the work in 
the linen-mills, and to the difficulty that he 
found in adapting himself to any other. And 
now his narrative suddenly glowed with active 
personal interest, for, with each succeeding sen- 
tence about his apprenticeship in Lurgan, there 
rose into clearer memory visions of a charming 
fortnight once spent at the home of the owners 
of the mill. 

I have set for myself to-day the task of de- 
scribing the past week of actual service in the 
ranks of the industrial army. My pen runs 
wide of the subject, and I have to force it to the 
retrospect. There were five working-days of 
nine hours and a quarter each, less the " called 
time " eaten out by the rain. Never was there 
clearer proof of the pure relativity of time meas- 
ured by an artificial standard. Hours had no 
meaning; there were simply ages of physical 
torture, and short intervals when the physical 
reaction was an ecstasy. 



38 THE WOKKEKS 

We were called at six on Tuesday morning ; 
and at twenty minutes to seven we had break- 
fasted, and were ready to start for the works, 
each with his dinner folded in a piece of news- 
paper. Passing from our side street to the road 
which leads to the Post, we were at once merged 
in a throng of workingmen moving in our di- 
rection. 

I was suddenly aware of a novel impression 
of individuality. Gangs of workingmen, as I 
recalled them, were uniform effects in earth- 
stained jeans and rugged countenances, rough 
with a varying growth of stubborn beard. To 
have distinguished among them would have 
seemed like distinguishing among a crowd of 
Chinese. Now individuality began to appear in 
its vital separateness, and to awaken the sense 
of infinite individual sensation, from which we 
instinctively shrink as we do from the thought 
of unbroken continuity of consciousness. 

But my eyes were growing sensitive to other 
differences, certainly to the broad distinction be- 
tween skilled and unskilled workmen. Many 
orders of labor were represented — masons and 
carpenters and bricklayers and plasterers, be- 
sides unskilled laborers. An evident superior- 
ity in intelligence, accompanied by a certain in- 
definable superiority in dress, was the general 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 39 

mark of skilled labor. And then the class of 
unskilled workers was noticeably heterogeneous 
in composition, while many of the other class 
were plainly of American birth. 

It is a mile from Highland Falls to West 
Point, and we moved briskly. There was little 
conversation among the men. Most of them 
had taken off their coats, and with these over 
their arms and their dinner - pails in hand, 
they walked in silence, with their eyes on the 
road. The morning was sultry and overhung 
with heavy clouds, full of the promise of rain. 
A forest lines much of the road, and from the 
overhanging boughs fell great drops of dew, 
dotting the surface of soft dust. The wayside 
weeds and bushes were gray with a coating of 
dust, and seemed to cry out in the still, hot air 
for the suspended rain. 

The old Academic building stood near to the 
Mess Hall at the southern end of the Post. In 
process of removal one wing had been blown 
up by dynamite, I was told, and now its site lay 
deep in heaps of debris. It was here that one 
gang of laborers was employed, and it was with 
them that the boss had instantly given me a job 
upon my application on the previous morning. 

There were about sixty men in the company. 
Most of them stood grouped among the ruins, 



40 THE WORKERS 

ready to begin work on the hour. I had but to 
follow their example. I hung my coat, with my 
dinner in one pocket, on a neighboring fence, 
and brought a shovel from the tool-house, and 
joined the other men. We stood silent, like a 
company at attention. The teamsters drove up 
with their carts, and the bosses counted them. 
In another moment the head boss, who had been 
keeping his eye on his watch, shut the case with 
a sharp metallic click, and shouted " Turn out!" 
in stentorian tones. 

The effect was magical. The scene changed 
on the instant from one of quiet to one of noisy 
activity. Men were loosening the ruined mass 
with their picks, and urging their crow-bars be- 
tween the blocks of stone, and shovelling the 
finer refuse into the carts, and loading the 
coarser fragments with their hands. The gang- 
boss, mounted upon a section of wall, began to 
direct the work before him. A cart had been 
driven among the ruins, and he called three of 
us to load it with the jagged masonry that lay 
heaped about it. It was too coarse to be han- 
dled with shovels, and we went at it with our 
hands. They were soon bleeding from contact 
with the sharp edges of rock ; but the dust 
acted as a styptic and helped vastly in the hard- 
ening process. When the cart was loaded, an- 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 41 

other took its place, and then a third and a 
fourth. 

In a harsh, resonant voice the boss was 
shouting his orders over our heads, to the far- 
thermost portion of the works. His short, 
thickset, muscular figure seemed rooted to the 
masonry on which he stood. The mingled 
shrewdness and brute strength of his hard face 
marked him as a product of natural selection 
for the place that he filled. His restless gray- 
eyes were everywhere at once, and his whole 
personality was tense with a compelling physi- 
cal energy. If the work slackened in any por- 
tion of the ruins, his voice took on a vibrant 
quality as he raised it to the shout of " Now, 
boys, at it there ! " and then a lash of stinging 
oaths. You could feel a quickening of muscular 
force among the men, like the show of eager in- 
dustry in a section of a school-room that has 
fallen suddenly under the master's questioning 
eye. 

In the dust which rose from the debris I 
picked up a mass of heavy plaster, and, before 
detecting my mistake, I tossed it into the cart. 
But the boss had seen the action, and instantly 
noticed the error, and now all his attention was 
directed upon Die. In short, incisive sentences, 
ringing with malediction, he cursed me for an 



42 THE WORKERS 

ignoramus and threatened me with discharge. 
I could feel the amused side-glances of the men, 
and could hear their muffled laughter. 

At last all the carts were loaded and driven 
away, and until their return, some of us were 
set at assorting the debris — throwing the splin- 
tered laths and bricks and fragments of stone 
and plaster into separate heaps. The work 
compelled a stooping posture, and the pain of 
lacerated fingers was as nothing compared with 
the agony of muscles cramped and forced to un- 
accustomed use. 

A business-like young fellow, with the air of a 
clerk, now began to move among the men, and 
they showed the keenest interest in his approach. 
I heard them speak of him as the " timekeeper," 
but I had no knowledge of such a functionary, 
and I wondered whether he had any business 
with me. He hailed me with a brisk " What is 
your number ? " I looked at him in surprise. 
" He's a new hand," shouted the boss from his 
elevation. " What's your name?" asked the 
timekeeper, as he turned a page in his book. I 
told him, and when he had written it he drew 
from his pocket a brass disk, upon which was 
stamped the number six, and this he told me to 
wear, suspended by its string, and to show it to 
him as often as he made his rounds. 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 43 

The cartmen had reappeared and received 
their loads, and had again driven off, in long 
procession, in the direction of Highland Falls. 
We went back to the varied torture of assorting. 
But the pain was not purely physical. The 
work was too mechanical to require close atten- 
tion, and yet too exhausting to admit of mental 
effort. I did not know how to prevent my mind 
from preying upon itself. 

At last I hit upon a plan which appealed to 
me. I simply went back in imagination to the 
familiar country-seat, and followed the morn- 
ing through a likely course. We met at break- 
fast, and complained of the discomfort of the 
sultry day as we discussed our plans, and 
then we walked over the lawn to the pier. 
Two cruising sloops, that had waited in the 
hope of a freshening breeze, now weighed 
anchor, and under main-sail and top-sail and 
jib drifted slowly out of the harbor. We 
watched them in idle curiosity, wondering at 
the distinctness with which the conversation of 
the yachtsmen came back to us across the oily 
placidity of still water, until they seemed almost 
half way to the spindle, and then we agreed 
upon a morning ride. We telephoned to the 
stables, and before we were ready the horses 
stood restless under the jporte-cochbre. Step by 



44 



THE WORKERS 



step I followed our progress along the road that 
skirts the inlet, and across the crumbling bridge 
on the turnpike, and under the great, drooping 
elms which line the village-street in Fairfield, 
and up the long ascent of the Greenfield Hill to 
the old church, and then home by the " back 
road." The dogs came running at us from the 
stables with short, sharp barks of welcome as we 
cantered past, and we called to them by name. 
As we turned by the reservoir, we could see a 
groom running down the path in order to reach 
the house before us. Hot from the ride, we 
passed through the dim mystery of the hall and 
billiard-room and den, and out upon the ver- 
anda, where a breath of air was stirring, and the 
fountain played softly in its bed of vines and 
flowers. Louis had returned from market. Our 
letters lay in order on the settle, and near them, 
neatly folded, were the morning papers. And 
now Louis's approach was heralded by the tink- 
ling of ice against the glass of bumpers of cool- 
ing drinks, and his bow was accompanied with 
a polite reminder that luncheon would be served 
in half an hour. 

I had been working with all my strength. 
Now I looked up at the boss in some hope of a 
sign of the noon hour. There was none. Pain- 
fully I went back to the work. Again I tried to 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 45 

find diversion in this new device. Slowly, with 
double the needed time for each event, I fol- 
lowed the morning through another imaginary 
series. Now I was sure that the boss had made 
a mistake and had lost track of the time, and 
was working us far into the afternoon. The 
clouds had thickened, and the growing darkness 
I was certain was the coming night. Great 
drops of rain began to fall, but the men paid 
them no heed. Soon the drops quickened to a 
shower, and still the men worked on. The mois- 
ture from within and without had made us wring- 
ing wet when the boss ordered us to quit. We 
bolted for our coats and dinner-pails, and then 
huddled in the shelter of the still-standing walls 
of the ruin. Through one of the great door- 
ways I caught sight of the tower of a neighbor- 
ing building with a clock in it. It was twenty 
minutes to nine ! In all that eternity since we 
began to load the first cart, we had been work- 
ing one hour and forty minutes, and had each 
earned about twenty-nine cents. 

The rain cost us an hour of working-time, and 
then we went back, and found some relief from 
the earlier discomfort in the saturation which 
had thoroughly settled the dust. 

In another hour, with no freshening of the 
air, th© clouds faded out of the sky. The sun 



46 THE WORKERS 

shone full upon us, and there arose from the 
heaps of ruin a mist heavy with the smell of 
damp plaster. But I had my " second wind " at 
last, and I worked now with the feeling of some 
reserve of physical strength. It was with sur- 
prise that I heard the loud voice of the head 
boss in a shout of " Time's up ! " and almost be- 
fore I knew what had happened the men were 
seated on the ground, in the shadows of the 
walls, eating their dinners. 

I opened mine with much curiosity. There 
were two huge sandwiches, with slices of corned 
beef between the bread, and a bit of cheese and 
a piece of apple-pie, very damp and oozing. 
Among the other men, with my aching back 
pressed against the wall, I sat and ate my din- 
ner, lingering over the last crumbs like a child 
with some rare dainty. 

At the end of the forty-five minutes allowed to 
us at noon, there came again, from the head boss, 
the order to " Turn out." In a moment the 
scene of the morning was renewed. There was 
the same alternation between loading the carts 
and assorting the debris. 

We had been but a few minutes at work when 
the cadets went marching past, on their way to 
mess. Familiar as most of the men were with 
the sight, they seized eagerly upon the diversion 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 47 

that it offered. The boss relaxed his vigilance. 
The work visibly slackened, as we lent our- 
selves to the fascination of individual motion 
merged into perfect harmony of collective move- 
ment. Conspicuous in the rear was the awk- 
ward squad, very hot in its effort to walk erect, 
and keep its shoulders back and its little fingers 
on the seams of its trousers. The men laughed 
merrily at the comical contrast between such 
grotesquely strenuous efforts at conformity and 
the ease and strength and grace of the unison 
which preceded it. 

No rain came to give us breathing-space in 
the afternoon. Hour by hour the relentless 
work went on. The sun had soon absorbed the 
last drop of the morning rain, and now the ruins 
lay burning hot under our feet. The air quiv- 
ered in the heat reflected from the stone and 
plaster about us ; the fine lime-dust choked our 
breathing as we shovelled the refuse into the 
carts. You could hear the muttered oaths of the 
men, as they swore softly in many tongues at the 
boss, and cursed him for a brute. But cease- 
lessly the work went on. We worked as though 
possessed by a curious numbness that kept us 
half-unconscious of the straining effort, which 
had become mechanical, until we were brought 
to by some spasm of strained muscles. 



48 THE WOKKEKS 

But five o'clock came at last, and with it, on 
the second, the loud " Time's up ! " of the head 
boss. You could see men fairly check a tool in 
its downward stroke, in their eagerness not to 
exceed the time by an instant. In two minutes 
the tools were housed and the works deserted, 
and the men were running like school-boys, with 
a clatter of dinner-pails, in a competitive scram- 
ble for seats in the dump-carts, which were 
moving toward Highland Falls. 

The hindmost were left to walk the mile to 
their lodgings. I fell in with two old Irishmen, 
who noticed me with a friendly look, and then 
went on with their conversation, payirfg me no 
further heed. But I felt strangely at home with 
these old men. Their short, faltering steps ex- 
actly suited my own, and I comfortably bent my 
back to the angle of their stoop, not in an effort 
to simulate their figures, but because to stand 
erect cost me exquisite agony. 

The men in the carts were soon out of our 
sight, but the remnant was large and was thor- 
oughly representative. We formed a weird pro- 
cession, this fragment of a company in the ranks 
of labor. There were few native-born Ameri- 
cans, one or two perhaps, besides myself; but 
there were Irish and Scandinavians and Hun- 
garians and Italians and negroes. 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 49 

As a physical exertion, walking was not hard 
after our day's labor. It was a change and a 
rest, and we must all have felt the soothing re- 
freshment in the breath of cool air which was 
moving down the river, and in the soft light of 
the early evening, which brought out in new 
loveliness the curves of the opposite hills and 
deepened the shades of blue and green. My own 
appreciation of all this and more would have 
been livelier but for two overpowering appe- 
tites, which were asserting themselves with un- 
suspected strength. I was hungry, not with the 
hunger which comes from a day's shooting, and 
which whets your appetite to the point of nice 
discriminations in an epicure's dinner, but with 
a ravenous hunger which fits you to fight like a 
beast for your food, and to eat it raw in brutal 
haste for gratification. But more than hungry, 
I was thirsty. Cold water had been in abundant 
supply at the works, and we drank as often and 
as freely as we chose. But water had long since 
ceased to satisfy. My mouth and throat were 
burning with the action of the lime-dust, and the 
physical craving for something to quench that 
strange thirst was an almost overmastering pas- 
sion. I knew of no drink quite strong enough. 
I have never tasted gin, but I remembered in one 

of Froude's essays a reference to it as much in 
4 



50 THE WOKKEKS 

use among working-men, and as being seasoned 
^o their taste by a dash of vitriol, and eagerly I 
longed for that. 

Half-way down the road we met some young 
women in smart dog-carts driving to the sunset 
parade at the post. In the delicate fabric and 
color of summer dress they seemed to us the 
embodiment of the cool of the evening. Sud- 
denly I looked with a keener interest. With her 
fingers outstretched she was shading her eyes 
from the horizontal rays of the setting sun, and 
she did not see us, rather saw through us, as 
through something transparent, the familiar ob- 
jects on the roadside. I had seen her last in 
town at a wedding at St. Thomas's, and fate un- 
kindly sent her up the aisle on the arm of another 
usher. I laughed aloud, a short, harsh laugh, that 
escaped me before I was aware, and that had 
in it so odd a quality that it gave me an uncom- 
fortable feeling of unacquaintance with myself. 
The two old Irishmen turned inquiring glances at 
me, and appeared disturbed at my serious look. 

My room, when I reached it, was, in spite of 
wide-opened windows, like Nero's bath at Baise. 
The ceiling and walls glowed with stored-up 
heat. Jim was there making ready for supper, 
and I could hear Jerry and Pete in their room 
in similar preparation. 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 51 

When I put my hands into the cold water, I 
could scarcely feel them ; but the pain of cleans- 
ing grew sharp, and yet, when I had thorough- 
ly washed them, although the fingers felt double 
their normal size, they were really less swollen, 
and were far on the way to comfort. 

The reaction had set in now, and I could feel 
it in great, cooling waves of physical well-being. 
The table was heaped with supper, huge slices 
of juicy sirloin, and dishes of boiled potatoes 
and cabbage and beans, from which the steam 
rose in fragrant clouds. By each plate was a 
large cup of tea, so strong and hot that it bit 
like lye, and it soon washed away the burning 
lime-dust. 

We sat down with our coats and waistcoats 
off. The men were in the best of good-humor, 
and the conversation ran into friendly talk. 
They asked me how I liked my job. I thought 
much better of it by this time, and I tried to 
wear the air of critical content. They may have 
had their own notions about my previous expe- 
rience of manual labor, but certainly they did 
not obtrude these with any show of suspicion. 
They accepted me as a working-man on perfect- 
ly natural terms. Until Wilson came I was the 
only unskilled laborer among them, but my dif- 
ferent grade was no barrier to our intercourse, 



52 THE WOEKEES 

and we met and talked with the freedom of men 
whose experience is innocent of conventional re- 
straints. 

Long after supper we sat on the porch, smok- 
ing in the twilight. A deep physical comfort- 
ableness possessed us. Each mouthful of meat 
and drink had wrought miraculous healing, and 
had restored wasted energy in measures that 
could be felt. My muscles were sore, but the 
very pain turned to pleasure in the ease of re- 
laxation. 

The men were town artisans, skilled laborers, 
attracted here by the abundance of work. Jerry 
was a plasterer, and Pete a bricklayer, and Jim 
a stone - mason. A short, slender figure, a 
smooth-shaven face with small, sharp, regular 
features, black hair, and gray eyes, is a sufficient 
outline of Jerry's personality. His air was that 
of a cynic, and there was a cynical flavor in his 
speech, but the sting of it was gone at the sight 
of his soft gray eyes, full of generous reserve of 
human kindness. 

Pete was a well-set-up young fellow, of twen- 
ty-five, perhaps, plainly of German parentage. 
Like Jerry, he was smooth-shaven, and there 
was a striking contrast between his dark hair 
and his singularly fair skin and blue eyes. He 
was a bricklayer, and ambitious of promotion. 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 53 

He spoke hopefully of an appointment in the 
Navy Yard as a result of a recent examination. 

Jim was the only married man among us. 
His wife and three children were in Brooklyn, 
and Jim went home every Saturday night, and 
spent Sunday with them. He was a handsome 
young Scotsman, with curling brown hair, and 
brown eyes, and a well-formed mustache, and a 
round face with full features. In the casual 
flow of our talk, Jim spoke of Burns, and quoted 
him with a ready familiarity. It was easy to 
catch the drift of his liking. Its set was stead- 
ily toward passages which sing the wrongs and 
oppression of the poor. Jim had none of the 
tricks of a declaimer ; but with jerks of unstud- 
ied emphasis he repeated familiar lines until 
you were conscious of new meaning and strength. 
He was sitting with his chair tilted against the 
wall, and his heels resting on a round, and his 
hands clasped about his knees. His eyes were 
fixed upon the evening gloom as he recited : 

Man's inhumanity to man 

Makes countless thousands mourn. 

The verses seemed exactly to fit his mood, for 
he repeated them again and again, with linger- 
ing liking for their sense and alliteration. 

Jerry broke in abruptly here with sudden, 



54 THE WORKERS 

unmeasured condemnation of the dulness of 
evenings in a country town in the absence of 
the theatre, pronounced theatre. The drama 
had fired his imagination for the moment, for 
he broke through his wonted reserve and waxed 
fluent as he expressed his views : 

" When I go to the theatre, I go to laugh. I 
want to see pretty girls and lots of them, and I 
want to see them dance. I want songs as I can 
understand the words of, and lots of jokes, and 
horse-play. You don't get me to the theatre to 
see no show got up by Shakespeare, nor any of 
them fellows as lived two thousand years ago. 
"What did they know about us fellows as is liv- 
ing now ? Pete, you mind that Tim Healy in 
the union, him that's full of wind in the meet- 
ings ? Onct he give me a book to read, and he 
says it's a theatre piece wrote by Shakespeare, 
and the best there was. I read more'n an hour 
on that piece, and I'm damned if there was a 
joke into it, nor any sense neither." 

We were presently yawning under the stars, 
and I was more than glad when the men spoke 
of bed. Almost in the next moment, to my con- 
sciousness, Mrs. Flaherty was knocking on the 
door, bidding us wake and not to go to sleep 
again, for it was six o'clock. 

Of the five, this second day was the hardest. 



A. DAY-LABORER AT WEST POIKT 55 

My body was sore in every part when I began 
to work, and the help of hardening muscles I 
did not gain until the third day. Mrs. Flaherty 
had skilfully bound up the slight wounds on my 
fingers. The merciful rain came twice to our 
relief, once in the morning and again in the af- 
ternoon. But this was not an unmixed bless- 
ing, for in the minutes of delay we could but 
calculate the growing loss in wages, and watch 
the sure vanishing of any surplus above actual 
living expenses. I remember making an esti- 
mate on my way to my lodgings that evening, 
and it was with much sinking of heart that I 
discovered that my earnings made a total rather 
less than the cost of the day's living. 

There has been difficulty in the way of inter- 
course with the men. I speak no Italian, nor 
any of the Scandinavian tongues, so that my ac- 
quaintance has been confined to my own coun- 
trymen, who are few in number in the gang, and 
to the Irishmen and negroes, and an occasional 
Hungarian who understands my stammering 
German. And within the English-speaking cir- 
cle, in the absence of this, there have been other 
barriers. There is wanting that social freedom 
that is most natural in Mrs. Flaherty's home. 
There is much of it among the foreigners. 
They hang together at their work, and sit in 



56 THE WORKERS 

separate groups through the noon hour, and one 
commonly hears, especially among the Italians, 
that picturesque volubility which sets you won- 
dering as to the subject of such fluent debate. 
Among the English-speaking men, the Irish and 
negroes are as Jews and Samaritans ; but aside 
from this, the general attitude is one of sullen 
suspiciousness. Few appear to know the others, 
and not even their wretchedness draws them 
to the relief of companionship. Sometimes we 
hear warm greetings among acquaintances, or 
see some show of friendliness, but this is mark- 
edly out of keeping with the general tone of 
things. The usual intercourse is an exchange 
of experiences, an account of the circumstances 
which brought them to their present lot, among 
men who happen to be working side by side or 
sitting in company at the noon hour. Quite as 
commonly one hears only muttered curses 
against the boss. 

You would gather from their own accounts 
that many of the men are unused to unskilled 
labor. There is a singular uniformity in their 
histories. Nearly all have seen better days, and 
are now but tiding over a dull season in their 
trades, or are earning enough to take them to 
some other part of the country, where there is a 
quickening in the demand for their labor. 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 57 

I found myself growing doubtful of these un- 
varying tales. The mechanism became too ap- 
parent. " I am really an efficient and energetic 
workman," each seemed to say ; " you see me 
now in a strait of circumstances. You should 
see me at my trade, in which I am an adept. I 
am out of that employment now because of de- 
pression in the business, but when business re- 
vives, or when I can reach Chicago or St. Louis 
or Minneapolis, my labor will be in strong de- 
mand.'' Irresistibly one is led to the belief 
that most of these men probably have no trade, 
or, at the best, are inefficient workmen, who, un- 
able to keep a job long, habitually pick up a liv- 
ing at work like this, in the careless makeshift 
of a shiftless life. 

It is refreshing to meet others who are frankly 
laborers. All their lives they have been bred to 
unskilled labor, and they make no pretence of 
anything different. They are hard men who 
look out upon a world that is hard to them at 
every point of contact ; but they are true men, 
by virtue of their honesty and directness, and 
one likes them accordingly. Some of them are 
old, and it is pitiful to see them tottering under 
the burden of years, and staying off actual want 
by forcing their rheumatic limbs through the 
drudgery of this rude toil. 



58 THE W0EKEES 

I had noticed the absence of one of this coterie 
for a day or two when, in the middle of a morn- 
ing's work, he appeared among the ruins. He 
was an old Irishman. His face was swollen 
from toothache, and was bound up in a cotton 
bandanna. His hands were clasped on his 
stooping back, and he moved with the painful 
motion that suggests acute rheumatism. For a 
time he stood watching us at our work and ex- 
changing words with some of the men about his 
complaints, when suddenly he burst into tears. 
The men jeered him, and angrily told him to be 
gone. I had a sickening feeling of cruelty as I 
saw him go sobbing down the road ; but when I 
spoke of him at the noon hour the men explained 
that it was a disgrace to have him crying there, 
but that they would see that his wants were pro- 
vided for. 

There was a revelation in the discovery of the 
degree to which profanity is ingrained in the 
vernacular of these men, as representatives of 
the laboring poor. They swear with the readi- 
ness of instinct, not merely in anger, when their 
language mounts to a torrent of abuse unspeak- 
ably awful in its horrid blasphemies, but in 
commonest intercourse, when their oaths are as 
meaningless as casual interjections. And almost 
never is the rude hardness of their speech soft- 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 59 

ened by the amenities which seem so natural a 
part of language. The imperative, more than 
any other mood, is rudely thrust into common 
use. They are even punctilious in its employ- 
ment. 

A single instance will serve to point the nat- 
ure of this graceless speech. Two boys of ten 
or twelve are employed in carrying water to the 
men at their w r ork. One carries his bucket 
through the building to those engaged in the 
upper stories ; and the other, a flaxen-haired, 
delicate child whose thin legs bend under his 
burden, serves those of us who are at work on 
the heaps below. Through all the day, and es- 
pecially in its greatest heat, the boys run busily 
from the works to a neighboring pump, and re- 
turn with bucketfuls of water, which are at once 
surrounded by thirsty workmen and emptied in 
a few minutes. Regardless of the prevailing 
custom, I always thanked the little fellow for 
my drink. Soon I noticed that even this instinc- 
tive acknowledgment seemed to embarrass him. 
In an interval of rest he came up to me, after 
receiving my thanks. "You shouldn't thank 
me," he said. " And why not ? " I begged to 
know. " Because, you see, I'm paid to do this," 
was his conscientious answer. A mere child, 
naturally gentle, and yet so bred to rougher 



60 THE WOEKEES 

usage that a simple " Thank you " jarred upon 
his sense of right ! A few minutes later I saw 
the two boys in a rough-and-ready fight, and 
their language lacked none of the horror of 
that of their elders. 

I shall be on the road again to-morrow morn- 
ing, and I shall go as penniless as I came, but 
somewhat richer in experience. I have been 
through nearly a week of labor, and have sur- 
vived it, and have honestly earned my living as 
a working-man. In the future I shall have the 
added confidence which comes of knowing that, 
if work offers, I shall probably be able to per- 
form it. But this is not the only cause of my 
increased light-heartedness. I am frankly glad 
to get away from the job on the old Academic 
building. This is a selfish feeling, and is not 
without the cowardice of all selfishness. I hope 
for a job of another kind, for a time at least, be- 
cause I wish to see some hopefuller side of the 
lot of common labor. When we draw too near 
to the hand of Fate, and begin to feel as though 
there were a wrong in the nature of things, it is 
best, perhaps, to change our point of view — if 
we can. This may account for some of the drift- 
ing restlessness among working-men of my 
class. 

The salient features of our condition are plain 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 61 

enough. We are unskilled laborers. We are 
grown men, and are without a trade. In the 
labor market we stand ready to sell to the high- 
est bidder our mere muscular strength for so 
many hours each day. We are thus in the low- 
est grade of labor. We are here, and not higher 
in the scale, by reason of a variety of causes. 
Some of us were thrown upon our own resources 
in childhood, and have earned our living ever 
since, and by the line of least resistance we have 
simply grown to be unskilled workmen. Oppor- 
tunities came to some of us of learning useful 
trades, and we neglected them, and now we have 
no developed skill to aid us in earning a living, 
and we must take the work that offers. 

Some of us were bred to farm labor, and almost 
from our earliest recollection we worked in the 
fields, until, tiring of country life, we determined 
to try some other ; and we have turned to this 
work as being within our powers, and as afford- 
ing us a change. Still others among us, like 
Wilson, really learned a trade ; but the market 
offers no further demand for the peculiar skill 
we possess, and so we are forced back upon skil- 
less labor. And selling our muscular strength 
in the open market for what it will bring, we sell 
it under peculiar conditions. It is all the capi- 
tal that we have. We have no reserve means of 



62 THE WORKERS 

subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for 
a " reserve price." We sell under the necessity 
of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speak- 
ing, we must sell our labor or starve ; and as 
hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have 
no other way of meeting this need, we must sell 
at once for what the market offers for our labor. 
And for some of us there is other pressure, un- 
speakable, immeasurable pressure, in the needs 
of wife and children. 

The contractor buys our labor as he buys 
other commodities, like brick and iron and stone, 
which enter into the construction of the new 
building. But he buys of us under certain re- 
strictions to us both. The law of supply and 
demand does not apply to our labor with the 
same freedom as to other merchandize. We are 
human beings, and some of us have social ties, 
which bricks and iron have not, and we do not, 
therefore, move to favorable markets with the 
same ease and certainty as these. Besides, we 
are ignorant men, and behind what we have to 
sell is no trained intelligence, nor a knowledge of 
prices and of the best means of reaching the 
best markets. And then we are poor men, who 
must sell when we find a purchaser, for no " re- 
serve price" is possible to us. 

The law of supply and demand meets with 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 63 

these restrictions and others. If it applied with 
perfect freedom to our commodity, we should 
infallibly be where is the greatest demand for 
our labor ; and with perfect acquaintance with 
the markets we should always sell in the dear- 
est. But the benefits of perfect freedom of sup- 
ply and demand would not be ours alone. If 
we sold in the dearest markets, the employer 
would as certainly buy in the cheapest. He has 
capital in the form of the means of subsist- 
ence, and can stand off for a " reserve price," 
and could force us to sell at last in the pinch 
of hunger, and in competition with starving 
men. 

As matters are, our wages might rise, in an in- 
creased demand for labor, far above their pres- 
ent point ; but even under pressure of decreas- 
ing demand, and with scores of needy men eager 
to take our places, our wages, if we had employ- 
ment at all, would not fall far below their present 
level. So much has civilization done for us. It 
does not insure to us a chance to earn a living, 
but it does measurably insure to us that what 
we earn by day's labor, such as this, will at 
least be a living. 

As unskilled laborers we are unorganized 
men. We are members of no union. We must 
deal individually with our employer, under all 



64 THE WORKERS 

the disadvantages which encumber our position 
in the market as compared with his. 

But his position is not an enviable one. He 
is a competitor in a freer market than ours. He 
has secured his contract as the lowest bidder, 
under a keener competition than we know, and 
in every dime that he must add to wages in or- 
der to attract labor, and in every dollar paid to 
an inefficient workman, and in every unforeseen 
difficulty or delay in the work, he sees a scaling 
from the margin of profit, which is already, per- 
haps, the narrowest that will attract capital into 
the field of production. The results of our labor 
are worth nothing to him as finished product 
until given sections of the work are completed. 
In the meantime he must advance to us our 
wages out of capital which is a product of past 
labor, his own and ours as working-men, and of 
other capital. And this he must continue to do, 
even if his margin of profit should wholly dis- 
appear, and even if ultimate loss should be the 
net result of the expenditure of his labor and 
capital. In every case, before any other com- 
modity has been paid for, we have insured to us 
the price for which we have sold our labor. 

Our employer is buying labor in a dear market. 
One dollar and sixty cents for a day of nine 
hours and a quarter is a high rate for unskilled 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 65 

workmen. And the demand continues, for I 
notice that the boss accepts every man who ap- 
plies for a job. The contractor is paying high 
for labor, and he will certainly get from us as 
much work as he can at the price. The gang- 
boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly 
does he know his business. He has sole com- 
mand of us. He never saw us before, and he 
will discharge us all when the debris is cleared 
away and the site made ready for the construct- 
ive labors of the skilled workmen. In the mean- 
time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost 
of physical labor which we, individually and col- 
lectively, are capable of. If he should drive 
some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be 
able to continue at work, he would not be the 
loser, for the market would soon supply him 
with others to take our places. 

We are ignorant men, and we have a slender 
hold of economic principles, but so much we 
clearly see : that we have sold our labor where 
we could sell it dearest, and our employer has 
bought it where he could buy it cheapest. He 
has paid high for it, but not from philanthropic 
motives, and he will get at the price, he must 
get, all the labor that he can ; and, by a strong 
instinct which possesses us, we shall part with 
as little as we can. And there you have, in its 



66 THE WORKERS 

rudimentary form, the bear and the bull sides of 
the market. 

You tell us that our interests are identical 
with those of our employer. That may be true 
on some ground unknown to us, but we live 
from hand to mouth, and we think from day to 
day, and we have no power to " reach a hand 
through time, to catch the far-off interest of 
tears." From work like ours there seems to us 
to have been eliminated every element which 
constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no 
personal pride in its progress, and no commun- 
ity of interest with our employer. He plainly 
shares this lack of unity of interest ; for he takes 
for granted that we are dishonest men, and that 
we will cheat him if we can ; and so he watches 
us through every moment, and forces us to real- 
ize that not for an hour would he intrust his in- 
terests to our hands. There is for us in our 
work none of the joy of responsibility, none of 
the sense of achievement, only the dull monot- 
ony of grinding toil, with the longing for the 
signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end 
of the week. 

We expect the ready retort that we get what 
we deserve, that no field of labor was closed to 
us, and that we are where we are because we are 
fit, or have fitted ourselves, for nothing better. 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 67 

Unskilled labor must be done, and, in the nat- 
ural play of productive activity, it must inevit- 
ably be done by those who are excluded from 
the higher forms of labor by incapacity, or in- 
efficiency, or misfortune, or lack of ambition. 
And being what we are, the dregs of the labor 
market, and having no certainty of permanent 
employment, and no organization among our- 
selves, by means of which we can deal with our 
emploj^er and he with us by some other than an 
individual hold upon each other, we must ex- 
pect to work under the watchful eye of a gang- 
boss, and not only be directed in our labor, but 
be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, 
through our tasks. 

All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives 
are the hard, barren, hopeless lives that they are 
because of our own fault, and that our degrada- 
tion as men is the measure of our bondage as 
workmen. 

This seems to state an ultimate fact, and then, 
with the habit of much of such thinking, to 
settle itself peacefully, with an easy conscience, 
behind the inevitable. 

But for us there is no such peace or comfort 
in the inevitable. And yet, even in this state- 
ment of our case, we are not without hope. We 
are men, and are capable of becoming better 



68 THE WORKERS 

men. We may be capable of no other than un- 
skilled labor, but why should we be doomed to 
perform it under the conditions which now de- 
grade us at our work ? 

Imagine each of us an ideal workman. Through 
all the hours of the working-day we labor con- 
scientiously, with no need of oversight beyond 
intelligent direction; for each of us feels the 
keenest interest in the progress of the work, be- 
cause we are honest men, and, with far-sighted 
knowledge, we know that by our best labor in 
any form of useful production we are contribut- 
ing our best to the general prosperity, as well as 
our own, and that it is by our energy and per- 
sonal efficiency that we may open for ourselves 
a way to promotion. Here clearly is a solution 
on ideal grounds. Is there no remedy that can 
reach us as we are ? 

Our ambition must be fired, our sense of re- 
sponsibility awakened and enlisted in our labor, 
our intelligences quickened to the vision of our 
own interests in the best performance of our 
duty. Life will not be rendered frictionless 
thereby. Work will still be hard, but to it will 
be restored its dignity, its power to call into 
play the better part of a man, and so build up 
his character. 

We have already seen how such an end is 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 69 

realized in the initial betterment of character 
itself. Let us see whether something might not 
be done by an initial improvement in the con- 
ditions of employment. 

Let us suppose now that we are not ideal 
characters, but ordinary men, whose lot in life is 
to perform unskilled labor ; but let us suppose 
that we are an organized body of workmen. The 
contractor made terms with us as an organized 
gang for the removal of the old building. Our 
organization, from long experience of such work, 
was able to enter into an eminently fair agree- 
ment. The contract rests upon a basis of time. 
For the completed work we are to receive a fixed 
sum, provided that it is finished by a given date. 
If we finish the work, according to the terms of 
the contract, one week earlier, we are to receive 
a bonus in addition to the fixed amount ; if two 
weeks earlier, there will be an increase in the 
bonus. In the meantime advances are to be 
made to us, week by week, in the form of days' 
wages, but so regulated as to protect the con- 
tractor against loss if the gang should fail to 
complete the work. 

Every member of the gang is perfectly f amiliar 
with the terms of the contract, and knows thor- 
oughly the advantages of an early completion of 
the job. We agree among ourselves upon the 



70 THE WORKERS 

number of hours which shall constitute a day's 
work, and from our own number we elect a boss, 
who will give direction to our labor, and under 
whose orders we bind ourselves to serve. It is 
no part of his duty now to stand guard over us 
in the office of a slave-driver to prevent our 
shirking, for we effectually perform that service 
for ourselves, seeing to it, with utmost regard for 
our interests, that no man among us fails to do 
his share in the common task. The boss is now 
the best and most intelligent worker among us, 
and not only does he direct our efforts, but, with 
his own hands, he sets the example of energetic 
work for the securing of the best terms that the 
contract offers for our common good. 

In a true sense now we have got a job. It is 
ours. The work is hard, but we have an object 
in working hard. Every stroke of labor is not 
a listless, time-serving economy of effort, but an 
eager and willing furthering of the work toward 
its completion and our own advantage. We are 
glad in the progress of our job, even if we are 
glad from no higher motive than our personal 
profit. We have a sense of responsibility and 
the keen interest which comes of that, even if 
they rise in no better source than our greed for 
gain. 

It is true that the root of the matter lies deeper 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 71 

than this. We may work under hopefuller con- 
ditions and be, intrinsically, no better men. Our 
selfishness may take on the refinement of the 
altruism that merely seeks our own in the wel- 
fare of others ; our ignorance may become illu- 
mined by an enlightened self-interest ; our vices 
may assume respectability ; and yet our old hard- 
ness of heart remain in full possession of us. 
But the truly pertinent question is this : Near- 
er to which of these ways of living lies the liv- 
ing way? In which have we the better chance 
to become better men? Life in its present 
course is to most of us a miserable bondage. We 
work daily to physical exhaustion ; and, with no 
power left for mental effort, our minds yield 
themselves to the play of any chance diversion 
until they lose the power of serious attention. 
In what constitutes for us the work of life there 
is no pleasure, no education, no evoking of our 
better natures. 

All truly productive labor performed under 
right conditions is itself a blessing. It partakes 
of the highest good that life offers. It is a 
bringing of order out of chaos, a victory over 
forces which can be reduced from evil mastery 
to useful service. It thus becomes the type of 
that labor which is the work of life, the mastery 
of self in the building of character. In this 



72 THE WORKERS 

sense it was that the monks of the Middle Ages 
framed their motto, Laborare est Orare — labor 
is prayer. But robbed of its true conditions 
and reduced to the dishonor of time-service un- 
der the eye of a slave-driving boss, who impels 
us with insults infinitely more degrading than 
the lash, labor is no longer prayer, but a blas- 
phemy, which finds expression in the words 
which rise readiest to our lips. 

I have been writing from the position of an 
unskilled workman, with no apparent allowance 
for my newness to the life. The physical stress 
and strain, for example, how different my ex- 
perience of these as compared with that of the 
other men inured to them by long habit! A 
year or two of such labor, and how great the 
physical change! My hands would be hard, 
and the friction of this work, so far from wound- 
ing them, would render them the more imper- 
vious to harm. My muscles would be like iron, 
and would lend themselves with far greater ease 
to the stress of manual labor. Ten years would 
find me a seasoned workman. 

But under conditions of labor such as these, 
what changes other than physical would there 
be ? My body might be hardened in fibre to 
the point of high efficiency in manual labor, but 
the hardening of mind and character — is it likely 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 73 

that this would be of the nature of the strength 
of more abundant life, or of the hardness of 
petrifaction ? 

I have received the strangest kindness from 
the men, the most tactful treatment of me as a 
novice. They laughed at my strenuous efforts 
to do what was so much easier to them, and 
they laughed when the boss singled me out for 
abuse, but never ill-naturedly, I thought. And 
those who made up to me, and with whom I 
picked up acquaintance, showed the kindest con- 
sideration. They never pressed me with em- 
barrassing questions, but fell gracefully into the 
easy assumption that I was a factory hand or a 
" tradesman " out of a job. It was natural to 
adopt the general strain and speak of plans 
which involved my going "West. 

In spite of their roughness and hardness of 
manner and speech, one never felt the smallest 
fear of these men, and you had a growing feel- 
ing that their better natures were never far to 
seek. And yet in reality here they were, a curs- 
ing, blaspheming crew ; men upon whose lives 
hopelessness seems to have settled ; whose idea 
of work is a slavish drudgery done from the 
instinct of self-preservation and to be shirked 
whenever possible ; whose idea of pleasure is 
abandonment to their unmastered passions. 



74 THE WORKERS 

I had a purpose in quitting work in the middle 
of Saturday afternoon. I went to my lodgings 
and asked Mrs. Flaherty for an early supper of 
anything that she could give me without trouble. 
Then I brushed my clothes and washed myself, 
and made myself as presentable as my slender 
pack permitted. My beard was now of nearly 
two weeks' growth, and my face was well burned 
by the sun, and my clothes, in spite of the pro- 
tection of overalls, were much labor-stained. 

I felt some security in my disguise, and after 
an early supper I walked over to see the sunset 
parade. On the road I met the men returning 
from the works, and had to run a gauntlet of 
questions as to whether I had left the job for 
good, and what I meant to do. 

There was bustle in the camp ; a running to 
and fro of cadets, who appeared to be subject to 
many calls ; a nervous appearing and vanishing 
at the tent-doors of figures which were in proc- 
ess of achieving parade-dress ; a hasty personal 
inspection of arms and uniform ; and then sud- 
denly, out of apparently inextricable confusion, 
there emerged, without a trace of disorder, the 
two companies, in double lines of perfect sym- 
metry, before the inspecting officer. 

Then followed the sunset parade. Seated on 
the benches under the trees, and grouped on the 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 75 

turf behind, was an eager crowd watching in- 
tently, in perfect stillness, every evolution of the 
cadets. The fascination was in the sense it gave 
you of abounding life, of youth and strength and 
vigor, brought to perfect unity in willing sub- 
ordination to authority. Here was the type of 
highest organization, the voluntary submission 
of those who are " fit to follow to those who are 
fittest to lead." So much has civilization achieved 
for the purpose of self-defence. The mission of 
many of these young officers will be to take such 
men as those with whom I have been working, 
and teach them the manly lesson of obedience, 
and awaken in them the feelings of courage and 
loyalty and esprit de corps. Civilization is yet 
a long way from such organization for industrial 
ends, if ever such corporate action will be pos- 
sible or good ; but certainly it will not be long 
before civilization gives birth in increasing num- 
bers to " captains of industry," who will feel 
with their men other ties than the " nexus of 
cash payment," and who will attack the problems 
of production with other aims than selfish accu- 
mulation. Under the direction of such leaders, 
workingmen will be led to far greater conquests 
over the resources of nature than any in the past, 
and, sharing consciously in these victories as 
the fruits of their own labors, there will open to 



76 THE WORKERS 

them a new life of liberty and hope in willing 
allegiance to true control. 

The intense satisfaction I felt in the rest of 
yesterday (Sunday) was heightened by a feeling 
of hopefulness as I thought of the future of 
workingmen in a country like ours. Here are 
almost boundless natural resources, capable of 
supporting many times our present population. 
Under the stimulus of private acclamation, what 
marvellous genius and skill and enterprise have 
directed labor to the development of our na- 
tional wealth ! When, with the growth of better 
knowledge, there is added to this stimulus 
among the great leaders of industry a sincere 
desire for the common good and a purpose to 
make the conditions of employment the means 
of achieving this good, how far greater must be 
the industrial results, and how far better the 
lives of the workers ! 

I felt aglow with this idea as I walked, in the 
afternoon, down the road below Highland Falls. 
It was a warm mid-summer day, and in keeping 
with its restful quiet the air moved gently among 
the leaves in the tree-tops. I was disturbed by 
the sound of music from the deck of an excur- 
sion steamer, and, seized with sudden desire foi 
a glimpse of the river, I vaulted a low stone 
wall, and quickly made my way over the mossy 



A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT 77 

carpeting of a wood which covers the bluff above 
the water. 

I did not see, at first, the abrupt ending of 
the wood and the sweep of an open lawn, and 
when I caught sight of that I was only a few 
yards from a rustic bench. There two persons 
sat, with their backs toward me, but I recognized 
the girl at once as an acquaintance, and I knew 
that I was a trespassing vagrant. The man I 
knew well, for he was a college classmate and a 
charming fellow, and I longed to ask his views 
on the question of the improvement of the lot of 
unskilled laborers by means of organization. 

But I grew painfully conscious of my work- 
stained clothes, and my faded flannel shirt, and 
the holes in my old felt hat, and of how all these 
marked me as belonging now to another world. 
And so I quietly stole away and returned to 
" mine own people." 



CHAPTER III 

A HOTEL POUTER 

The Highlands, Orange County, N.Y., 
Tuesday, 25 August, 1891. 

I am now a hotel porter. More strictly, I 
have just resigned my position, and with the net 
proceeds of three weeks' wages, which amount 
to four dollars and two cents, I am ready to 
make a fresh start in the early morning. The 
leisure of this last evening at the hotel I shall 
give to the task of summing up the fragmentary 
notes which I have made in such chance hours 
of rest as were to be had in a service which has 
kept me on duty from five o'clock in the morn- 
ing until eleven at night. 

Why I have lingered here so long I scarcely 
know. The time has flown with amazing swift- 
ness. I soon found my new job easily within 
my powers, as compared with the last one, and 
I have felt a certain restful security which has 
held me here for longer than I meant to stay. 
But I am ready enough to set out now, and I feel 
again a " yearning for the large excitement " that 

78 



A HOTEL PORTER 79 

comes of life upon the open highway, and the 
chances of a living earned by the work of my 
hands. 

I am not twenty miles beyond my last sta- 
tion at Highland Falls. It was raining when I 
left Mrs. Flaherty's home, and she pleaded with 
me to stay ; but I had nothing with which to 
pay for further entertainment, and I certainly 
had not the courage to return to the job on the 
old Academic building. And so we parted, Mrs. 
Flaherty standing with arms akimbo in the open 
door of her cottage, a final protest against so 
rash a venture as her last word, while I lifted 
my hat to her and to Minnie, who peered at 
me from the shadow of the passage behind her 
mother. 

It must be owned that the prospect was not 
encouraging to my new departure. At intervals 
of less than a mile, sometimes, I was driven to 
seek refuge from the rain. The mountain-road 
was soft with mud, and a secure footing was a 
fruitless search. In the hot air the heavy damp- 
ness added to the discomfort of walking. Only 
in a general way I knew that the road would 
lead me eventually over the Highlands to Mid- 
dletown, which lies in my westward course. The 
beauty of the country was lost upon me, for the 
mountain was cloaked in a heavy fog, and all 



80 THE WORKERS 

that rose visible were short, succeeding sections 
of muddy road, bordered with forests of oak and 
hickory-nut and chestnut, with matted weeds 
growing thick to the wagon-tracks, and clumps 
of blackberry bushes standing here and there 
along the lines of tottering stone walls and 
wooden fences. 

In the middle of the noon hour I reached 
Forest-of-Dean Mines. A general supply store 
stands on the roadside. It was thronged with 
Italian laborers. I waited in its shelter until 
the one-o'clock whistle recalled the men to their 
work, and then I made terms with an Italian boy, 
who was left in charge, for a five-cent dinner. 
The child spoke English with perfect readiness. 
Almost concealed behind the counter, he looked 
wonderfully important and business-like as he 
reached up to apply the weights and fixed his 
great black eyes shrewdly upon the oscillations 
of the balance. For five cents he agreed to give 
me two ounces of cheese and six soda-crackers. 

This proved a hopelessly inadequate dinner, 
and by the middle of the afternoon I was pain- 
fully hungry. It must have been between the 
hours of three and four when, on a stretch of 
level road, I met a tall, over-grown negro youth 
with a bucket of sour milk in each hand, which 
was plainly destined for a pig-pen that I had 



A HOTEL PORTER 81 

passed but a few yards back. Looming dimly 
in the fog behind him, I could see the outlines 
of a large frame structure with lightly built ve- 
randas engirding it. I asked the youth what it 

was, and learned that it was a hotel, the " 

House." 

'Did he think that I could get a job there? ' 
He was doubtful of that, but advised my seeing 
the " boss," whom I should find in the office. 
The office was deserted when I entered it. 
Some men were playing billiards in the larger 
room beyond, which, with the office, forms the 
ground floor of a building detached from the 
main hotel, but joined by a veranda on the 
upper story. 

I sat down, and began to dry my feet at a slow 
fire which burned in an iron stove. Presently 
there came in a tall man, straight of figure, with 
black eyes and hair and mustache and an un- 
commonly dark complexion. I rose with an 
inquiry for the proprietor, and he sat down with 
the assurance that he was the man. There were 
two definite requests in my mind. I meant to 
apply first for a job ; but, expecting nothing of 
a permanent character, I resolved to ask work 
for the remaining afternoon for the sake of food 
and a night's shelter from the rain. To my sur- 
prise, instead of the negative I expected to my 



82 THE W0EKEES 

first request, I found some encouragement in the 
proprietor's manner. He owned to the need of 
a porter until the arrival, in a few days, of the 
man who had been engaged for that position. I 
declared my willingness to serve and to begin 
work on the moment. He pointed out that he 
did not know me, and that he was not in the 
habit of engaging servants whom he did not 
know. ' Besides, there was not much for the 
porter to do, and for his services he was paid at 
the rate of eight dollars a month and his board.' 
I was ready with a plea for a trial, if only for 
a single day, and presently the proprietor con- 
sented. 

He rose, and at once began to instruct me in 
my duty. Standing on the threshold between 
the office and billiard-room, he pointed to the 
bare floors, and explained that they must be 
scrubbed every morning. He then indicated the 
score or more of oil-lamps with which the rooms 
were lighted, and said that these must be kept 
clean and filled. Next he opened a door from 
the office into a small room in which was a cot. 
That was to be my sleeping - place, and he 
showed me, in one corner, buckets and a mop 
and a broom, which were intended for the porter's 
use. Quite abruptly he asked to see my hat, 
and, wondering at the request, I showed him 



A HOTEL PORTER 83 

the stained black felt with ragged holes in the 
crown. " That won't do," he said, and with the 
w r ord he took down from a peg a porter's cloth 
cap with a patent-leather visor, and bade me 
wear it at my work. It was much too small, but 
by dint of holding my head with care I could 
keep it on ; thus balancing the cap as best I 
could, and with the broom in hand, I followed 
my employer for further instructions. He led 
the way to the verandas, and explained that they 
must be swept each morning before the guests 
are up, and again in the afternoon, at the hour 
when they are least in use. They were nearly 
deserted now, and the proprietor told me to 
begin my work by sweeping them, and then he 
left me. 

I could have danced with sheer delight. Not 
if I had deliberately planned it could I have ef- 
fected a better arrangement. It fitted my needs 
exactly. A change to lighter work for a time 
was almost a necessity ; for my hands were much 
blistered and torn, and they refused to heal 
under the friction of my last employment. And 
then — and my spirits rose buoyantly to this 
idea — here was a chance to see something of 
domestic service, and such another, under con- 
ditions so favorable, might not offer in all my 
journey across the continent. 



84 THE WORKERS 

" This morning/' I thought to myself, " I was 
a roving laborer in search of work and with but 
ten cents in my pocket ; now I am a hotel por- 
ter, with bed and board assured and an open 
field for observation, and some certainty of a 
surplus, regardless of the weather, when I quit 
the job, although, at its present rate, my daily 
wage is a fraction less than twenty-seven cents." 

As I swept the verandas my plans began to 
form themselves with exciting interest. " Here 
is clearly a splendid opportunity. I have been 
frankly told that a porter is already engaged, 
and is on his way, and that my occupancy of 
office is simply for the interregnum. Plainly, if 
I can give evidence, in the meantime, of useful- 
ness such that, when the regular porter comes, 
I shall be continued in some employment about 
the hotel, that will be a distinct achievement ; 
and it will not be without a bearing upon the 
practical question as to what a penniless man 
may do for himself in the way of winning per- 
manent employment that offers chances of pro- 
motion." I resolved to bend all my energies to 
that. 

When the verandas were swept, I returned to 
the office and billiard-room, and began to study 
the field. The floors were sadly in need of 
scrubbing; many of the lamp chimneys were 






A HOTEL PORTER 85 

smoked, and all were far from clean ; the win- 
dows of both rooms were much weather-stained ; 
and the paint on the woodwork could be im- 
proved by a thorough washing. I then went 
over the grounds, and found the walks in dis- 
order, and the lawns matted and strewn with 
litter. 

I lit the lamps at nightfall, and awaited a 
summons to supper. While in the region of the 
kitchen I noticed that an extra hand might 
often prove of service there. Back in my own 
domain for the evening, I found my offices in 
demand in attendance upon the billiard and 
pool tables. 

By eleven o'clock the house was still, and I 
was at liberty to go to bed. Among the furni- 
ture in the office was an alarm-clock. This I 
wound up, and set for a quarter to five. 

The morning was splendidly bright. When 
I stepped out upon the veranda the sun had al- 
ready cleared the tops of the wooded Highlands, 
and, with the radiance reflected from infinite 
rain-drops in the forests, there rolled from their 
" gorgeous gloom " the " sweet after-showers, 
ambrosial air." In no direction was the outlook 
wide ; but the air gleamed in the sunlight with 
the crystal clearness which gives its peculiar 
quality to our autumn, and which so early as 



86 THE WORKERS 

August can be had only at considerable alti- 
tudes. 

But the scrubbing awaited me, and was a task 
of much uncertainty In the kitchen I filled my 
buckets with water — cold water, I am sorry to 
say. I threw wide open the doors and windows, 
and first sprinkled the floors, as I had seen shop- 
keepers do, and then swept them thoroughly. 
I tried to apply the water by means of a mop 
with a long wooden handle; but failing com- 
pletely in that, I detached the handle, and get- 
ting down on my knees, I went carefully over 
the surface with the mop in hand. Frequently 
I changed the water, and when the scrubbing 
was done I looked the damp floors over with 
immense satisfaction. 

Until I was called to breakfast I spent the 
time in sweeping the verandas and clearing from 
the walks the twigs and dead leaves with which 
they were strewn after the rain. In no way 
was I prepared for the alarming surprise which 
was in store for me. When I returned to the 
office I stood aghast at the sight of the newly 
scrubbed floors. They were dry now, and were 
covered with fantastic designs. Every final 
movement of the mop was distinctly traceable 
in streaks of unmistakable dirt. And there was 
the proprietor at work at his desk, and he faintly 



A HOTEL PORTER 87 

noticed me as I entered. I stood expecting my 
discharge, with what fortitude I could summon, 
but receiving no further attention from my em- 
ployer, I hurried back to the work on the walks 
and drives. During the dinner-hour I brought 
a broom to bear upon the coiling traceries on 
the floor, and succeeded in softening their 
bolder outlines. 

But scrubbing proved a peculiarly difficult 
art. On the second morning I did all that I 
had done before, and then got buckets of clean 
hot water and a fresh mop ; and on hands and 
knees I went over the floors, wiping them up 
with scrupulous care. The result was no better, 
once dry, and the designs in daubs of dirt were 
as fantastic as ever. On the third morning I 
tried still a new plan, but only with the result 
of effecting a change in the designs. I was 
learning to scrub by an empirical process, and 
the fourth venture approached success. Hot 
water and soap, and a scrub-brush vigorously 
applied, and then a final swabbing, left the floors 
comparatively clean, and free from the persistent 
mop-stains. 

Only one more of my duties I found difficult 
of mastery. Like scrubbing the floors, washing 
the windows was full of surprises. From one 
of the house -maids I learned that clean, hot, 



88 THE WORKERS 

soapy water was the prime necessity. I was de- 
lighted with the first result, for after the wash- 
ing within and without, I had visions of the 
glass in a high state of clean transparency. But 
the sun had absorbed the water, and left stains 
of tenacious soap, when I came to the polishing, 
and after hours of labor I almost despaired of 
ever bringing the panes to a reasonably untar- 
nished condition. 

The work has varied so little in detail that 
the history of a single day is an epitome of the 
three weeks' service : 

I am up at a little before five in the morning. 
The floors of the office and billiard-room are my 
first concern; and by the time these are scrubbed 
it is six o'clock. The chef early noticed my will- 
ingness to lend a hand in the kitchen, and he 
rewards me with a liberal supply of hot water 
every morning, and a cup of coffee and a slice 
of bread at six o'clock when he takes his own. 
Fortified in this way, I sweep the verandas and 
walks, and rake the drives and lawns until 
breakfast. 

There is a curious, horizontal, social cleavage 
among the " help." I belong to the lower stra- 
tum. I first noticed the distinction at our 
meals. The negro head-waiter, and the pastry- 
cook, and the head-gardener, and the company 



A HOTEL PORTER 89 

of Irish maids, who do double duty as waitresses 
and house-maids, take their meals in the dining- 
room after the guests are served. The rem- 
nants of these two servings are then heaped 
upon a table in a long, low, dimly lighted room 
which intervenes between the kitchen and din- 
ing-room, and there we of the lowest class help 
ourselves. Our coterie consists of an English 
maid, a recent arrival from Liverpool, who 
serves as a dishwasher, three negro laundresses, 
two negro stable-boys and myself, with a vary- 
ing element in two or three hired men, who 
drop in irregularly from the region of the 
barns. 

Martha, the English maid, is chiefly in charge 
here, and she bravely tries to serve, and to 
bring some order out of the chaos ; but the task 
is beyond her. We take places as we find them 
vacant, and each helps himself from what re- 
mains to be eaten of the fragments of the meal 
just ended. There is always a towering sup- 
ply, but an abundance of a sort that deadens 
your appetite, like the blow of a sand-bag. 

I reproached myself with fastidiousness at 
first, and imagined that to the other servants, 
who shared it, the fare was entirely palatable ; 
and so I was surprised when, at a dinner early 
in my stay, one of the negro laundresses seized 



90 THE WORKERS 

a plate heaped with scraps of meat, from which 
we had all been helping ourselves, and carried 
it out with the indignant remark that it was fit 
only for the dogs, adding, sententiously, as she 
disappeared through the door : " We are not 
dogs yet; we are supposed to be human." And 
back to her afternoon's work she went, although 
she had eaten only a morsel. 

These meals were curiously solemn func- 
tions ; scarcely a word was ever spoken. Mar- 
tha was " cumbered about much serving," and 
very heroically she tried to impart some decent 
order to the meal, and a cheerfuller tone to the 
company. I never knew the cause of the sullen 
unsociability which possessed us, whether it was 
ill-humor born of the physical weariness from 
which all the servants seemed constantly to suf- 
fer as a result of the high pressure of work at 
the height of the season, or the revolting fare 
which often sent us unrested and unfed from 
our meals. 

It is the vision of supper that will linger 
clearest in my memory. The long, reeking 
room seen faintly in the yellow light of one be- 
grimed oil-lamp ; the ceiling so low that I can 
easily reach it with my upstretched hand, and 
dotted over with innumerable flies. The room 
is a paradise for flies, which swarm most in our 



A HOTEL PORTER 91 

food that lies in ill-assorted heaps down the 
middle of a rough wooden table. Here we sit 
in chance order, black and white faces often al- 
ternating ; the white ones livid in their vivid 
contrast with the background of the room's 
deep shadows, and the others ghastly visible in 
the general blackness from which gleam the 
whites of eyes. Sometimes the two stable-boys 
find seats together ; and then they bid defiance 
to the general gloom, and are soon bubbling 
over with musical laughter, that rolls responsive 
to the least remark from either. It is interest- 
ing at such times to watch Martha's face. The 
nervous energy which is always struggling there 
against a look of utter weariness shines victori- 
ous now, in the light of a new hope that a bet- 
ter cheer has come at last to her table. 

From breakfast I hurry back to the work 
of putting the grounds in order. The walks I 
sweep every morning, and then rake the drives 
and the lawns. 

It was at this work that I early found con- 
vincing proof of the completeness of my social 
change. The lawns at certain hours are in the 
possession of nurse-maids and infants. I have 
never calculated the number of children in the 
hotel, but their ages apparently mark every 
stage of advance from a few weeks to as many 



92 THE WORKERS 

years. My liking for children amounts to rev- 
erent devotion, and it gave me a shock, from 
which I have not recovered, to find that, un- 
shaven and uncouth in workmen's clothes, I had 
become for them a bogey with whom their 
nurses frighten them into obedience, warning 
them in excited tones with " Here comes the 
man to take you away ! " 

It was at this work, too, that I once incurred 
the avowed displeasure of a guest. She was a 
beautiful Philistine, with a keenly penetrating 
twang and turns of speech that bespoke the re- 
gions of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. 
But she was remarkably handsome, tall and 
graceful, and of high-bred bearing and of a thor- 
oughly aristocratic type. It must be confessed 
that whenever she was visible from my regions 
the section of the grounds which commanded 
a view of her, and was yet fairly beyond the 
sound of her voice, received assiduous atten- 
tion from me ; for she was highly remunerative 
to look at. I was sweeping a section of the 
walk immediately in front of the hotel. Unlike 
the work at West Point, a porter's duties do not 
preclude mental effort. Absorbed in thought 
and quite unconscious of my surroundings, I 
was suddenly recalled to them and to my sta- 
tion in life by nasal accents raised in strong 



A HOTEL PORTER 93 

reproof. I looked up in bewilderment, and saw 
confronting me the beautiful Philistine, holding 
a little child by each hand. Very straight she 
stood and bright-eyed, with her head thrown 
back, and an exquisite flush over her face, and 
her beautiful lips curled in anger, as she scold- 
ed me roundly for raising so much dust. I was 
unfamiliar with the etiquette of the situation, so 
I held my peace, and respectfully touched my 
cap, inwardly calling her the beauty that she 
was as she stood there, and ardently hoping 
that she would scold me more. 

From the lawns I go to the kitchen, and offer 
my services to the chef. Usually he has ready 
for me a basket of potatoes to peel. In a little 
shed by the kitchen-door I sit and peel endless- 
ly. The servants are flocking in and out through 
the open door in the fetid air. The heat is of 
the suffocating kind, in which the heavy air lies 
dead. It is nearing the dinner-hour, and every- 
one must work with almost a frenzy of effort. 
The high tension communicates itself to us all, 
and we feel the nervous strain upon our tem- 
pers. The hundred and one petty annoyances 
which cause the friction of household service 
prove too much, and the tension bursts into a 
furious quarrel between the Irish pastry-cook 
and the negro head- waiter. No one has time to 



94 THE WORKERS 

heed them, but his storming oaths and her 
plaintive, whining key, maintained with provok- 
ing tenacity, whatever relief they bring to them, 
are far from soothing to the rest of us. 

The maids are gathered from all parts of the 
hotel. Most of them have been on duty since 
six o'clock, and after the morning's work there 
now awaits them the rush of serving dinner. 
Want of sufficient sleep and utter physical 
weariness have drawn deep lines in their faces. 
Presently one of them, a slender young girl, 
sinks exhausted into a seat, and we hear her no- 
tion of the summum bonum : " Oh, I wish I was 
rich, and could swing all day in a hammock ! " 
I follow the direction of her eyes. Across a 
wide stretch of lawn and in the shade of some 
clustering maples I see the gleam of a white 
dress rocking gently in a hammock, and I catch 
the flutter of a fan and the light on an open page. 

Sometimes I am in the region of the kitchen 
during the dinner-hour itself. As an experi- 
ence, I fancy that it is not unlike that of being 
behind the scenes in the course of the play. 
The kitchen and pantry are ill-ventilated, and 
are hot to suffocation. About a counter-like 
partition which separates the two rooms crowd 
the eager waitresses, rehearsing in shrill tones 
their orders to the chef and his assistant. There 








I HELD MY 



•HACK. AM) RESPECTFULLY 
CALLING HER THE BEAUTY 



TOUCHED MY CAP, 

THAT SHE WAS. 



INWARDLY 



A HOTEL PORTER 95 

is a babel of voices striving to be heard, and a 
ceaseless clatter of dishes, and a hurrying to 
and fro. The chef is not a bad fellow, but his 
temper is rarely proof against the harassing 
annoyances incident upon serving a dinner, and 
he loses it in a torrent of oaths. The volume 
of noise increases until the height of dinner is 
reached and passed, and then it subsides, quite 
like a thunder-storm. 

The afternoon's work keeps me, for the most 
part, in my own regions. The lamps must first 
be cleaned and filled, and then the billiard- 
tables brushed for the evening play, and there 
may remain unfinished work on the grounds, 
which claims me until it is time to sweep the 
verandas again. 

When I am out of the office I must be careful 
that the doors and the windows are open, and 
my ears attentive to the bell ; for I am porter 
and bell-boy in one. 

A bell-boy is sometimes at a disadvantage. 
He is not supposed to explain, and circum- 
stances may wrong him. 

The bell rings. I run to the indicator, and 
then climb to the door that bears the correspond- 
ing number. A lady asks for a pitcher of ice- 
water. Unluckily the ice-chest is locked, and 
the key, I learn, is in the keeping of the head- 



96 THE WORKERS 

waiter. After hasty search, I find that official 
seated on a rock in the shade behind the barn, 
conversing with some of the hands. He tells 
me that there is no ice in the chest, and advises 
my going to the ice-house. I do so with all 
possible speed, and am fortunate enough to find 
a piece of loose ice not far below the surface of 
saw-dust. Back to the kitchen I run with it, 
wash it, and chop it into fragments. But all 
this has taken time ; it is very hot, and the lady, 
no doubt, is very thirsty. As I hand her the 
pitcher of water, her caustic acknowledgment 
expresses anything but gratitude. 

The verandas are no sooner swept for the 
afternoon than the stage appears from the sta- 
tion. I must be in attendance to relieve the 
newly arrived guests of their lighter luggage 
and, with the help of one of the stable-boys, to 
carry their trunks to their rooms. 

It was in such services as these that I met 
with an insuperable difficulty. Before I launched 
upon the enterprise of earning my living by man- 
ual labor I settled it with myself that I would 
shrink from no honest work, however menial, 
that might fall within the range of my experi- 
ment. I confess that, in my present avocation, 
when it came to the necessity of cleaning the 
cuspidors used by a tobacco-eating gentry, the 



A HOTEL PORTER 97 

task was accomplished only after hard setting of 
teeth, and much involuntary contraction of mus- 
cles. But I hasten to let fall a veil already too 
widely drawn from the hidden rites of a porter's 
service. The difficulty in point was of another 
kind, and had to do with tips. I was not un- 
prepared for the emergency, for the proprietor 
had hinted, in our first conversation, with every 
mark of embarrassment, and with a tone of 
apology for the eight dollars a month, that that 
amount was sure to be supplemented by gratui- 
ties. It might have been different under other 
circumstances ; but when I had seen the guests 
and noted the unmistakable marks of residence 
in cheap flats and low-rent suburban cottages, 
and realized the careful husbanding of funds 
and the close calculation which make a summer 
outing possible to them, their fees were some 
degrees beyond the possible to me. 

In the case of the luggage, it was easy to bow 
acknowledgment and to decline in favor of Sam, 
the stable-boy, who, beaming with delight, stood 
ready to receive gifts to any amount, and who 
loved me w^armly. But when I was alone with 
some guest in the act of a personal service, the 
situation created by a proffered fee proved em- 
barrassing to us both, and was not to be relieved 
by bows and expressions of sincere appreciation. 



98 THE WORKERS 

The evening's duties are usually the lighting 
of the lamps at nightfall, and assorting the 
mail that comes in after supper, and attending 
the billiard and pool tables, and answering the 
bell-calls. Saturday afternoons and evenings 
are varied with industrious preparations for ex- 
tra guests. This makes added demands upon us 
all, and the servants dread Sunday as bringing 
always the severest strain of the week. My own 
share of extra work is confined to Saturday after- 
noon and evening, when I put up cots, and carry 
bed-linen and blankets about, under the orders 
of the house-keeper, usually until midnight. And 
when I go to sleep at last it is on the hay in the 
barn, for my room is swept and garnished on 
Saturday and given up to a guest. It is no hard- 
ship to sleep on the hay, but, through knowledge 
gained from the scale of prices posted in the 
office, I can but understand what an admirable 
business arrangement it is for the proprietor 
to so utilize my room over Sunday. The added 
revenue which is thus yielded during my stay 
amounts to fifteen dollars, and as the total sum 
of my wages for the three weeks is five dollars 
and sixty-seven cents, the net returns to the pro- 
prietor in service and profit speak well for his 
management. 

But there is other evidence of good manage- 



A HOTEL PORTER 99 

ment, and in a quarter that appeals to me more. 
His treatment of the " help " is so uniformly 
fair. I do not like him ; but, so far as I know, 
I am alone in my dislike among all the servants 
of the house ; and I cannot fail to see that a feel- 
ing of personal loyalty is behind much of the 
patient, enduring service to which I have been 
witness. Only once was there an approach to a 
collision between us, and certainly I emerged 
from. that in rather a ridiculous light. 

It was but two or three evenings ago. Usu- 
ally I have been able to eat at our table enough 
at least to deaden appetite, but on that evening 
I could eat nothing. As I passed through the 
pastry-kitchen on my way back to the office I 
saw a few pieces of corn-bread which were ap- 
parently to be thrown away. I asked the cook 
for some, and she readily told me to help my- 
self. On a flagging near the kitchen-door I sat 
down to eat the bread, and the proprietor must 
have seen me there in the dim light. I had not 
finished when the negro head-waiter came upon 
me in much excitement. I belong to a lower 
order of service than he, but he treats me civilly, 
and there was nothing more than nervousness in 
his manner now. 

" You mustn't get cheese from the pantry with- 
out leave," he was saying in high agitation. 



100 THE WORKERS 

I thought that he had gone mad, but he pres- 
ently made clear that the proprietor had come 
to him with the complaint that I was eating 
cheese, which is kept in the pantry, and is not 
intended for the lower servants. The supper- 
table had upset me, and the corn-bread which 
caused the present trouble had been cold com- 
fort. I was furiously angry now, hot and aglow 
with a passion of rage which at that moment was 
a splendid sensation. With great civility I 
thanked the head-waiter, and explained the mis- 
take, and showed him a fragment of bread still 
in my hand, and then asked where I should find 
the proprietor. He had gone to the office, and 
I followed him there, scarcely conscious of 
touching the ground. It was close upon the 
mail-hour, and the office was crowded with 
guests. Near the stove stood the proprietor, 
and he saw me as I approached him. I was look- 
ing him full in the eyes when I told him, with- 
out introductory remarks, that if he had any 
further criticisms to offer upon my conduct he 
was at liberty to bring them directly to me. If 
I had had any sense of humor left I should have 
laughed then at his appearance, and have fore- 
stalled the ridiculous scene, in which, with a 
look of distressed embarrassment, he edged tow- 
ard the door, and I followed, with my eyes on 



A HOTEL PORTER 101 

his, as I treated him to the most cynically pat- 
ronizing sentences which I could frame, while 
the guests looked on in silence. 

Once in the quiet of the veranda, he explained 
to me that, since he holds the head- waiter re- 
sponsible in such matters, he had naturally com- 
plained to him, and added that he was sorry if 
any mistake had been made. I pointed out 
the mistake, and felt the fool that I was, and 
spent the evening in a long walk over the hills, 
returning only in time to lock up and put out 
the lights. 

As a basis of comparison I have now the two 
short terms of service at West Point and here. 
I received employment at both places as almost 
any laborer might have done, and I found in 
them both the means of livelihood. But as a 
servant, I have found more than that. The man 
who had been engaged as porter appeared about 
a week after my arrival. He proved to be Mar- 
tha's brother, and a newly landed immigrant. 
There was no mistaking the last fact. His 
peaked countenance, with surviving traces of 
ruddy color; his queer pot-hat, that rested on 
his ears ; his bright woollen tippet, defying the 
heat ; his baggy suit, which had doubtless served 
for day and night through all the voyage ; his 
heavy boots — all proclaimed him the raw ma- 



102 THE WORKERS 

terial of a new citizen. Nor could there be a 
doubt of his kinship with Martha. She stood 
with me awaiting the stage, directing eager 
glances down the carriage-drive and excitedly 
asking questions about its coming. She was 
the first to see it, and to recognize her brother 
on the seat with Sam, and she fluttered about in 
the unconcealed delight of affection, perfectly 
unconscious of everyone, until her arms were 
about her brother's neck, and she was leading 
him away to the kitchen. 

Nothing was said to me about leaving ; Mar- 
tha's brother became her assistant as a dish- 
washer, and learned to lend a generally useful 
hand in the kitchen. 

And so I had fairly won my place, and had 
open before me a way of promotion. Experi- 
ence alone could disclose the value of the open- 
ing ; but the " House " is a winter as well 

as a summer resort, and a porter's services are 
therefore in demand through the year. If 
efficient, intelligent labor could not eventually 
win higher and more responsible position in 
such an enterprise, and possibly gain, at last, 
an interest in the business, the case is surely 
exceptional. 

It is the change in external conditions and its 
bearing upon me as a human worker which have 



A HOTEL PORTER 103 

most impressed me, in contrast with my first ex- 
perience. 

I worked for nine hours and a quarter at West 
Point, and had, at the end of the day's labor, if 
the weather had been good, eighty-five cents 
above actual living expenses. Here I have usu- 
ally worked from five o'clock in the morning 
until eleven at night, at all manner of menial 
drudgery, and have gone to bed in the comfort- 
able assurance that, in addition to food and 
shelter, I have earned twenty-six cents and a 
fraction. And yet, as a matter of choice, purely 
with reference to the conditions under which 
the work is done, I should infinitely prefer a 
week of my present duties to a single day at 
such labor as that at West Point. 

The work here is specific, and it is mine, to 
be done as I best can. Responsibility and in- 
itiative and personal pride enter here, and ren- 
der the eighteen hours of this work incomparably 
shorter than the nine hours of my last. It is 
true that it partakes of the character of much 
household service, in that it is ever doing and is 
never done ; but there is a feeling of accomplish- 
ment in the fact of getting my quarters clean 
and the grounds in order, and in keeping them 
so, although it be at the cost of labor always 
repeated and never ended. 



104 THE WORKERS 

Perhaps it is because I am still haunted by 
the thought of the cruel bondage of unskilled 
labor, under which men exhaust their powers of 
body and mind and soul at work that, in the 
very conditions of its doing, seems to harden 
them into slaves, instead of strengthening them 
into men, that I fail to feel keenly the want of 
time that I can call my own. I have an inde- 
pendence of vastly better sort in having work 
which I can call my own, and which I can do 
with some human pleasure and interest and 
profit in its performance, however hard it 
may be. 

Slender as is my acquaintance with either, I 
yet see, with perfect certainty, that the standard 
of character is higher in this company of ser- 
vants than among the gang of unskilled laborers. 
Other causes may have a share in this result, 
but the efficient cause is clear in the better moral 
atmosphere in which the work is done. I do 
not know how conscious is the feeling of unity 
of interest with their employer, or of copartnery 
with one another in labor, or of personal respon- 
sibility ; but all these motives must play a part 
in effecting the successful accomplishment of 
the house-work, with its intricacies and inter- 
dependencies which render constant personal 
oversight impossible. Of course the proprietor 



A HOTEL PORTER 105 

has much trouble with the "help," and there 
are frequent changes among them; but the 
body of the company remains the same, and 
some of the servants have been here for several 
seasons. 

Certainly one is obliged to look elsewhere than 
to wages for a cause of better work as showing 
a finer moral fibre, if I may judge from my 
twenty-six cents a day. I dare say that mine is 
the minimum wage. The chef told me that he 
gets sixty dollars a month, and I fancy that his 
is the maximum sum. It is purely a guess, but 
I venture it, that the average among us would not 
exceed five dollars a week. Five dollars a week 
above the necessaries of life will buy much among 
the commonest proletariat. Under certain con- 
ditions that, or even a less sum, might buy in- 
dustrious and almost continuous effort for four- 
teen or eighteen hours a day, but not, I fancy, 
in the present economic condition of household 
servants in this country. There must be other 
causes to account for that. 

The want of time which is at one's own com- 
mand is the commonest objection urged against 
domestic service as accounting for the ready 
choice of harder work with far less of creature 
comfort, but with definite limits and entire dis- 
posing of the rest of one's day. Stronger than 



106 THE WORKERS 

this, I fancy, as an objection, is a social disa- 
bility which attaches to service, and under the 
sway of which a house-maid has not the pros- 
pect of so good a marriage, socially considered, 
as a factory girl, who earns a scanty living, but 
is subject to no one's command outside of the 
factory gates. 

The strength of social conventions is a force 
to be reckoned with among the working classes. 
It may seem that below the standing of folk 
gentle by birth and breeding there are no social 
standards or social barriers of serious strength. 
I begin to suspect that distinctions are as clearly 
made on one side of that line as the other. Very 
certain I am that the upper servants here and 
the nurses and house-maids are removed from 
us of the clothes-washing and dish-washing and 
floor-scrubbing fraternity by a very consider- 
able social gulf. 

A course of eighteen hours of continuous daily 
duty soon gives one a surprising relish for the 
pleasure of doing as you please. I know now 
something of the delight of a " Sunday off." I 
got my first leave of absence one afternoon when 
I was allowed to go to the village of Central 
Valley to have my boots mended. Not since I 
was a small boy at boarding-school have I felt 
the same vivid pleasure in going freely forth, 



A HOTEL PORTER 107 

knowing that, for the time, I was my own mas- 
ter ; and when I returned to the hotel, it was 
very much with the school-boy's feeling of pass- 
ing again under the yoke. 



CHAPTER IV 

A HIBED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 

WlLKESBARRE, PENNSYLVANIA, 

Saturday, September 19, 1891. 

I have a wide sweep of country to cover from 

the " House " in the Highlands above the 

Hudson, where I served as a porter, and received 
with my wages a reference to the effect that my 
work was done " faithfully and well," to the coal 
regions of Pennsylvania in the valley of the 
Susquehanna. 

My spirits rise at every recollection of the 
journey. For days I walked through the crisp 
autumn air, breathing its tingling freshness, and 
barely sensible of fatigue. 

The way led me over the rich farm -lands of 
Orange County, and across the Delaware, and 
through the lonely wilderness of the Pennsylva- 
nia border, until I emerged upon the hills above 
the Susquehanna, and caught sight of the splen- 
did valley, with its native beauty hideously 
marred by the blackened trails of forest fires 

108 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 109 

and the monstrous heaps of culm that mark the 
mouth of the coal-pits. 

So far work has not failed me, unless I mark 
as an exception the single case when I began a 
search, and brought it abruptly to an end by 
descending suddenly upon a camping party of 
friends. 

Quietly and mysteriously, I fancy, to the other 

servants, I appeared among them at the " 

House," and with as little notice I tried to steal 
away. Instead of going to the kitchen at five 
o'clock on that Wednesday morning for scrub- 
bing-water, I took to the road with my pack, 

and left behind me the " House " awaking 

to life in the servants' quarters. 

1 had been a gang-laborer and a hotel porter, 
and now I wondered w r hat my next role was to 
be. But the feeling was simply a genial curios- 
ity, and was free from the timid shrinking with 
which I set out from the minister's house in 
Wilton, and my lodgings at Highland Falls. 
Then it was under the spur of self-compulsion 
that I launched afresh upon this fortuitous life. 
With strong animal instinct I had clung to any 
haven where shelter and food were secure. 
Now I warmly welcomed a freer courage born 
of experience. Not too sure of newly gained 
powers, but like a boy learning to swim, I fan- 



110 THE WOEKERS 

cied that I felt the strength of some confidence 
in the novel element. Light-hearted in spite of 
my pack, which gained weight with every step, 
I walked briskly along the country roads, 
charmed with everything I saw, and feeling 
sure that my wages would see me through to 
another job. Was it a real acquisition, and had 
I learned to catch the strange pleasure of this 
fugitive life? or did the difference lie in the 
bracing cool of the morning, and the beauty of 
the open country, and the sense of freedom after 
long restraint, and, most subtly of all, in that 
little, hoarded balance in my purse ? 

It was nightfall when I entered Middletown, 
and too late to look for work. With my eye 
upon the rows of cottages which line the street 
by which I entered the town, I soon found a 
boarding-house for workmen. A bed could be 
had for twenty cents. At a bakery near by I 
got a loaf of bread and a quart of milk for a 
dime, and was thus supplied with a supper and 
breakfast. Twelve hours of unbroken sleep fell 
to me that night, and in the cool of a threatening- 
morning I set out to find work. The scaffolding 
about a brick building in process of erection 
drew my attention, and I applied for a job as a 
hod-carrier, but found no demand there for fur- 
ther unskilled labor. The boss in charge re- 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 111 

fused me with some show of petulance, as though 
annoyed by repeated appeals. He was not more 
cheerful, but was politely communicative enough 
when I asked after the likelihood of my finding 
work in the town. " There is no business doing," 
he said. "The bottom has fallen out of this 
place. There's two men looking for every job 
here, and my advice to you is to go somewhere 
else." 

At the head of the street I came upon the foun- 
dation work of another building, which, I learned, 
was to be an armory. Here the boss instantly 
offered me a job, if I could lay brick or do the 
work of a mason, but of unskilled labor he said 
that he had an abundant supply. " But yonder," 
he added, " is the Asylum, and much work is in 
progress on the grounds, and there, surely, is 
your best chance of employment." 

The Asylum was a State Homoeopathic Insti- 
tution for the Insane. I could see the large 
brick buildings on the highest area of spacious 
grounds, which spread away in easy undulations, 
with their natural beauty heightened by the 
tasteful work of a landscape gardener. 

Near the entrance to the grounds I came upon 
a large force of laborers digging a ditch for a 
water-main. The boss refused me a place, but 
not without evident regret at the necessity, and 



112 THE WORKERS 

he was at pains to explain to me that, already 
on that morning, he had been obliged to turn 
away half a dozen men. 

It was with no great expectation of success at 
finding work there that I began walking some- 
what aimlessly through the Asylum grounds. 
The first person whom I met was an old Irish 
gardener. He painfully stood erect as I ques- 
tioned him as to whom I should apply for a 
job, and supported himself with one hand on 
my shoulder, while he told me of the medical 
superintendent, and the overseer, and the fore- 
man, who are in charge of various departments 
of the work. Presently his face brightened with 
excitement as he pointed to a large man who 
was walking toward one of the buildings, and he 
pushed me in his direction with an eager injunc- 
tion to apply to him, for he was the overseer of 
the grounds. 

The overseer listened to my request and read 

in silence my reference from the " House, " 

and looked me over for a moment, and then 
abruptly ordered me to report at seven o'clock 
on the next morning, adding, as he disappeared 
within the building, that he was paying his men 
a dollar and a half a day. 

The old Irish gardener showed the heartiest 
pleasure at my success, and directed me to a 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 113 

boarding-house near the Asylum grounds, where 
I was soon settled, and where at noon I ate a 
memorable dinner, the first square meal for 
thirty-six hours, and the first one which had 
about it the elements of decent comfort since I 
left Mrs. Flaherty's table. 

At seven o'clock on the next morning I was 
one of a gang of twenty laborers who were dig- 
ging a sewer-ditch. The ditch had passed the 
farther edge of a meadow, and must cut its way 
through the field to the Asylum buildings, two 
hundred yards beyond. Its course was marked 
by a straight cut through the sod which was to 
furnish us a guide. Some of the men took their 
former places in unfinished portions of the work, 
and the rest of us fell apart, leaving intervals of 
about three yards from man to man. With the 
cut as a guide, and with the single instruction to 
keep the ditch two feet wide, we began to wield 
our picks and shovels. A thick, unmoving fog 
lay damp upon the meadow, already saturated 
with dew. The sun-rays, gathering penetrating 
power as they pierced the fog, were soon pro- 
ducing the effect of prickly heat. This atmos- 
phere, surcharged with moisture and lifeless in 
its sluggish weight, yet quick with stinging heat, 
was a medium in which the actual work done 
was out of proportion to its cost in potential en- 
8 



114 THE WORKERS 

ergy. In the forceful Irishism of one of the la- 
borers : " It was a muggy morning, and a man 
must do his work twice over to get it done." 

By dint of strenuous industry and careful im- 
itation of the methods of the other men, I man- 
aged to keep pace with them. I saw from the 
first that the work would be hard ; and in point 
of severity it proved all that I expected, and 
more. To ply a pick and urge a shovel for five 
continuous hours calls for endurance. Down 
sweeps your pick with a mighty stroke upon 
what appears yielding, presentable earth, only to 
come into contact with a rock concealed just be- 
low the surface, a contact which sends a violent 
jar through all your frame, causing vibrations 
which end in the sensation of an electric shock 
at your finger-tips. A few repetitions of this ex- 
perience are distinctly disheartening in effect. 
Besides, the sun has cleared the fog, and is 
shining full upon us through the still air. The 
trench is well below the surface, now, and we 
work with the sun beating on our aching backs, 
and our heads buried in the ditch, where we 
breathed the hot air heavy with the smell of 
fresh soil, and the sweat drips from our faces 
upon the damp clay. 

By nine o'clock what strength and courage 
I have left seem oozing from every pore. The 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 115 

demoralization is complete, and I know that only 
"the shame of open shame" holds me to my 
work. I dig mechanically on through another 
sluggish hour of torment ; and then I come to, 
and find myself breathing deeply, with long reg- 
ular breaths, in the miracle of " second wind," 
with fresh energy flowing like a stream of new 
life through my body. 

Through all the working hours of the day the 
foreman sat upon a pile of tools silently watch- 
ing us at the job. Now and then he politely 
urged that the ditch be kept not less than two 
feet wide, and nothing could have been further 
from his manner and speech than any approach 
to abusing the men. It was his evident pur- 
pose to treat us well, but the act of his over- 
sight, under the conditions of our employment, 
involved a practical wasting of his day, and cast 
upon us the suspicion of dishonesty. 

On the next morning, which was Saturday, the 
foreman sent me down the ditch, where the pipe 
was already laid, and ordered me, with two other 
men, to fill in the earth. Like a line of earth- 
works lay the " stubborn glebe" above the 
trench. The work of shovelling it back into 
place seemed easy at first, and was easy, as com- 
pared with the digging ; but the wet, cohesive 
clay that lined the ditch's brink yielded only 



116 THE WORKERS 

to the pressure of a compulsion very persist- 
ently applied. We quit on that evening at five 
o'clock, with a full day's pay for nine hours' 
work. 

The foreman met me on Monday morning 
with an order for yet another change. At the 
barn I should find " Hunt," he said, and I was 
to report to him as his " help." Hunt proved 
to be a good-looking, taciturn teamster, who had 
just hitched his horses to his " truck," and he 
told me to get aboard. The " truck " was a 
heavy four-wheeled vehicle without a box, but 
with, instead, a stout platform suspended from 
the axle-trees, and resting but a few inches 
from the ground. Standing upon this we drove 
all day from point to point about the grounds, 
attending to manifold needs. 

We had first to cart the milk-cans from the 
dairy to the kitchen. This errand took us to 
the rear of the Asylum buildings, where the en- 
tries open upon a series of quadrangular courts. 
Then from entry to entry we drove, gathering 
up great bags of soiled clothes, which lay in 
heaps about the doors, and we carted these to 
the laundry. Then back to the kitchen we 
went, and took on a load of huge cans filled with 
swill, and transferred them to a large pig-sty 
at the edge of the wood, below the meadow, ancj. 



A HIKED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 117 

there emptied their contents into hogsheads, 
from which, at stated hours, the swill is baled 
out to the loud-squealing herd within. Again 
we made the round of the entries, this time to 
gather up the waste barrels which stood full of 
ashes, and the results of the morning's sweep- 
ing; and having emptied these, we replaced 
them for a fresh supply. Then we drove to the 
garden, and carted from that quarter to the 
kitchen several loads of vegetables. 

The afternoon was consumed in supplying the 
demand for ice. Embedded in a mass of hay 
in the ice-house, the ice must first be uncovered, 
and the cakes, frozen together, must be pried 
apart with a crowbar and then dragged over the 
melting surface to the door, and finally loaded 
upon the truck. 

We first carted it to the barn-yard, where we 
washed it by playing water over it with a hose, 
and then to the kitchen wing, where we chopped 
it into smaller pieces and threw these into open- 
ings which communicated with the large refrig- 
erators inside. Again and again was this proc- 
ess repeated, until an adequate supply had been 
furnished, and then there remained before six 
o'clock time enough to cart to the pigs their 
evening meal from the kitchen. 

With slight changes in detail, this remained 



118 THE WORKERS 

the order of our work through the few days of 
my stay. I held the job long enough to find 
myself ensconced at the Asylum, and then I told 
the foreman that I wished to go. He looked at 
me in some surprise, and began to argue the 
point. "You'd better stay by your job," he 
said. "It is not the best work, but well find 
better for you before long." I thanked him 
heartily, and told him I was interested to learn 
that, but that I felt obliged to go. He shook 
hands with me, and cordially wished me luck, 
and told me to apply to him for work if I hap- 
pened again in those parts, and added that I 
could get my wages by calling at the office on 
the next afternoon, which was the regular pay- 
day. 

A free day was highly useful now, for my 
clothes and boots were seriously in need of re- 
pair. The pack contained the means of much 
mending, and by dinner-time my coat and trou- 
sers were patched, and my stockings were stoutly 
darned. But the boots were beyond me. Al- 
ready they had cost me dear, for a dollar, the 
earnings of four days as a porter, had gone for 
a pair of new soles, and now another outlay, 
enormous in its relation to my means, was an 
imperative necessity. 

I had made an appointment with a cobbler for 



A HIKED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 119 

an early hour in the afternoon, precisely as one 
would with a dentist ; for while he was at work 
on my only pair of boots, I had to sit by in my 
stocking feet. Secretly I welcomed the neces- 
sity, in spite of its calamitous cost. I could 
take a book with me, and read with a clear con- 
science. The cobbler was smoking his after- 
dinner cigar when I entered his shop. He was 
little inclined to talk ; and when he had finished 
his smoke he picked up a boot, and bent over it 
with an air of absorption. I was soon lost in 
my book. 

The work was nearly done when some move- 
ment of his drew my attention to the cobbler. 
I had been struck by his appearance, and now 
my interest deepened. Away from his bench it 
would not have occurred to one to assign him to 
that calling. He was an old man, whose mus- 
cular figure had acquired a stoop at the shoul- 
ders like that of some seasoned scholar. His 
features were clean-cut and strong. His blue 
eyes had a look of much shrewdness and force. 
There were deep lines about his mouth and in 
his forehead, which spoke of masterful conflict 
in life. Meeting him in the dress of a gentle- 
man, you would have said that he was a public 
man of some distinction, and with close acquaint- 
ance with affairs. In reality, he had sat for fifty 



120 THE WORKERS 

years upon that bench. He was growing com- 
municative now ; and from his personal history 
I tried to divert him to his views of life, think- 
ing that I must have found a philosopher in a 
man whose opportunities for reflection had been 
so great. But his talk was flowing freely, and 
would take its own course, careless of my prompt- 
ings. I settled myself to listen, and my inter- 
ested attention seemed to fire him with new zest. 
From personal narrative it was an easy step to 
events of our national history, and he warmed 
to these under the inspiration of the life of some 
great man connected with each. General Scott 
was his first hero ; and touching upon details of 
his history, which were wholly unknown to me, 
he pictured the inborn, warlike spirit of the man 
with amazing appreciation, and finally quoted 
the judgment of the Duke of Wellington, who, 
he said, had declared of Scott that, " as a gen- 
eral, he stood without a superior." Here he 
paused for a moment to explain that the Duke 
of "Wellington was a personage of exceptional 
military experience, whose judgments in such 
matters were entitled to the highest respect. 

The Civil War and Mr. Lincoln as the chief 
figure of those troublous times next inspired 
him. It was with no mean insight into the is- 
sues involved that he glowed with the thought 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 121 

of a constitutional question grown to sharp na- 
tional conflict, and settled at infinite cost, and 
transmitted as a most sacred trust, to be guard- 
ed with eternal vigilance. But the climax was 
reached when he turned back on his course, and 
began afresh, with the Father of his Country as 
his theme. The incident of the cherry-tree was 
repeated with sublime faith, and with highly 
dramatic effect. Encouraged by his success and 
my absorbed attention, he next recounted the 
events of that fateful June morning when the 
allied American and British forces were nearing 
Fort Duquesne. With keenest appreciation of 
the fatal irony of it, he repeated again and again 
his own version of the reply made to the warn- 
ing of young Washington by General Braddock : 
" You young buckskin ! you teach a British offi- 
cer how to fight ? " 

A chivalric spirit led him now to speak of 
" Lady Washington." This moved him most of 
all, and when he declared that he would repeat 
for me some lines composed by her, which he 
had learned by heart as a boy, his emotions 
were almost beyond control. His job was fin- 
ished now, and he drew himself up, and made a 
strong effort to modulate his voice, which was 
trembling with feeling. The lines had an 
evident magic for him, and he repeated them 



122 THE WORKERS 

with great throbs of emotion, while his eyes 
grew dim : 

Saw ye my hero ? 
Saw ye my hero ? 

I saw not your hero ; 

But I'm told he's in the van, 

When the battle just began, 

And he stays to take care of his men. 

Oh ye gods ! I give you my charge 

To protect my hero, George, 

And return him safe home to my arms. 

Then, bending toward me, he placed a trem- 
bling hand on my knee ; and looking dimly into 
my eyes, he said, in husky tones : " And they 
did, didn't they ? " I assented earnestly, 
charmed by his sincerity and enthusiasm, only 
hopeful that there was some mistake in the un- 
expected glimpse of Lady Washington in the 
character of a poet, and like my friend strug- 
gling with feeling that I found it hard to sup- 
press, and which expressed, would have been 
sadly out of harmony with the scriptural injunc- 
tion to " weep with them that weep." 

There was a charm in the old cobbler's har- 
angue, which I felt for long. Even his views of 
life seemed to appear in these crude enthusiasms 
upon general themes. There was a note of op- 



A HIKED MAK AT AIST ASYLUM 123 

timism which one could not fail to catch, and to 
respect in a man who, for fifty years, had hon- 
estly earned his living on a cobbler's bench. 
His sense of proprietorship in his country, and 
of natural right to high personal pride in her 
history, conveyed themselves to you as strong 
convictions, and you understood something of 
the power which dwells in a people who feel 
thus toward their country, and who share in her 
control. 

An hour later I was at the Asylum on the er- 
rand of getting my pay. I had anticipated the 
appointed time by a few minutes, and was the 
first of the workmen in the office. The clerk 
was in his place, however ; and my appearance, 
hat in hand, furnished him with the signal for 
drawing from his desk the receipt-forms, upon 
which the men acknowledge the payments by 
their signatures. In the bustle of the business 
just beginning, the clerk turned upon me and 
asked, somewhat brusquely, if I could write my 
name, or whether he should write it for me, and 
I affix my mark. So unexpected was the ques- 
tion, that I was conscious at first of some bewil- 
derment, and then of a rising resentment against 
the fact that such a question should be put to 
an American workman. I said that I had ac- 
quired the habit of signing my own name when 



124 THE WORKERS 

necessary ; but I might have spared myself that 
folly, for the clerk hastened to explain with the 
kindest consideration that, of all the laborers 
whom he habitually pays off, scarcely half can 
write ; " although," he added, with an admirable 
touch of fairness, "a very small proportion of 
the illiterate are native-born Americans." I am 
afraid that my resentment had its source in a 
grotesquely foolish feeling. I have been mis- 
taken for a drunkard, and a detective, and a dis- 
reputable double of myself, and have been made 
a bogey of to frighten children into obedience 
withal, but not once, so far as I know, have I 
been taken for a gentleman. And if the truth 
must be told, I fear that the very success of my 
disguise is somewhat chagrinning at times. 

There was no wrench on the next morning in 
parting with the family with whom I boarded, 
unless my landlady shared my regret at leaving. 
She was a meek little woman who slaved hero- 
ically at household work to support her daugh- 
ter, who studied stenography and typewriting, 
and her idle husband, who led the life of a 
professional invalid. He had tried upon me 
highly colored tales of his career as a soldier, 
and of what he would have done in life but for 
his ill-health, tales which I soon learned to in- 
terrupt with small services to his wife, and he 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 125 

gave me up as hopelessly unsympathetic. A 
baseball game on the Asylum grounds attracted 
a large crowd one afternoon ; and as Hunt and 
I drove past on an errand, I caught sight of the 
ex-soldier, who, at his home, was too great a suf- 
ferer to contribute even a helping hand at the 
housework toward his own support, but who 
here was dancing in vigor of delight over a two- 
base hit. 

It was clear that a rate of progress which had 
carried me not even so far as the border line of 
Pennsylvania, during nearly two months, would 
require a considerable portion of a lifetime in 
which to accomplish the three thousand miles 
before me. I resolved upon more energetic 
tramping as a wiser policy for, at least, the im- 
mediate future. 

A rough plan was soon formed. I had saved 
nearly six dollars. It was Wednesday morning. 
I would give three days to uninterrupted walk, 
and by Friday evening I should reach Wilkes- 
bane. The whole of Saturday, if so much time 
were needed, could then be given to a search for 
employment ; and the rest of Sunday would put 
me in trim to begin on Monday morning the 
work which would provide in a few days for 
present needs, and furnish a balance with which 
to begin the tramp once more. 



126 THE WORKERS 

At an early hour I was upon the high-road 
which leads to Port Jervis. The day was a per- 
fect type of the best season of our northern cli- 
mate, cloudless but for a fleecy embankment 
behind the purple hills to the north, flooded 
with a glorious light touched with grateful 
warmth, and which revealed with articulate dis- 
tinctness every visible object in the crystal-clear 
air — an air so pure and cool that it spurred you 
to your quickest step, and sent bounding through 
you a glad delight in breath and life. 

In all the landscape was the richness of color 
and the vividness of a transfigured world. An 
early frost had touched the foliage ; the leaves 
of the hickory - trees and elms were rustling 
crisply at their tips, and the sumach deepened 
into a crimson that matched the color of its 
clustered seeds, while the oaks and maples 
maintained the dark luxuriance of their summer 
leafage, boastful of a hardihood which would 
succumb only to the keener cold of the later 
autumn. 

Up hill and down dale my road led me, where 
substantial farm-houses, and enormous barns, 
and fields of standing corn, and herds of cattle 
in the pasture-lands, all indicated the necessa- 
ries and even the comforts of life in rich abun- 
dance, and emphasized the wonder that from 



A HIRED MAN AT A1ST ASYLUM 127 

such surroundings should come the recruits who 
ceaselessly throng our crowded towns. 

A few miles farther on the whole topography 
of the country changed. I had passed through 
the village of Otisville and was walking in the 
direction of Huguenot when my way carried me 
to a hillside from which I could see the long 
stretch of a valley, reaching far to the westward, 
and lined on both sides, with almost artificial 
regularity, by ranges of hills, which rose sharply 
from the plain below. Through a break at the 
north the Delaware flows, and, crossing the 
plain-like valley, disappears among the southern 
hills, while the valley itself, in almost unbroken 
symmetry, reaches on to the west. 

At the foot of the northern range, and on the 
eastern bank of the river, is the town of Port 
Jervis. Its outer streets are the light, airy 
thoroughfares of the usual American town, faced 
by small wooden cottages, each with its plot of 
ground devoted in front to a few square yards of 
turf, and carefully economized behind the house 
for the purpose of supporting fruit-trees and 
providing a vegetable garden. 

The great number of these individual homes, 
as indicating the manner of life of multitudes of 
the working classes in provincial towns, seemed 
to me to mark a conspicuous absence of crowded 



128 THE WORKERS 

tenement living ; and on its positive side to in- 
dicate at least the possibility of wholesome fam- 
ily life and of much home comfort. Certainly 
my experience at Highland Falls and at Middle- 
town confirms this impression. In each of those 
cases the people with whom I stayed owned 
their home and the plot of land about it, which 
contributed thriftily toward the family support. 
The houses w r ere ephemeral wooden cottages, 
done in the degrading ugliness inspired by the 
Queen Anne revival, and furnished in a taste 
even more florid, and they were not overclean. 
And yet they were comfortable homes, in which 
we fared handsomely, eating meat three times a 
day, and varieties of vegetables and admirable 
home-made bread, and knew no stint of sugar 
or butter, and slept in good beds in not too 
crowded rooms in an upper story. 

All about me here, and reaching down the 
long vistas of communicating streets, were the 
same external conditions, until I entered the 
closely built up " brick blocks " of the business 
quarter of the town. I could but think how char- 
acteristic of our smaller cities is this separate 
individual home-life of the wage-earning classes, 
and how increasingly are the improved means 
of transportation rendering like surroundings 
possible for the workmen of the larger towns. 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 129 

Having crossed the Delaware Uiver, about 
four o'clock I began a walk through a region no 
less beautiful than that through which I had 
passed in the morning. My way lay in the val- 
ley, directly under the steep hills that wall it in 
on the north. Their densely wooded sides cast 
deep shadows obliquely across the road, and in 
this grateful shade I walked on, listening to the 
songs of birds and the murmur of mountain- 
streams, and the cooling sound of spray splash- 
ing from ledge to ledge of moss-grown rocks. 

At sunset I entered the village of Milford, 
which nestles securely at the foot of the moun- 
tains of Pike County, a beautiful village of wide, 
well-shaded streets, where there was little to 
mar the elegant simplicity of dignified country 
homes, untouched by harrowing attempts at the 
fantastic. 

By eight o'clock I was fast, asleep in a work- 
men's boarding-house, and at sunrise on the 
next morning I was on the road which turns 
sharply up the mountain-side. A dense mist 
lay upon the valley, but my way soon led me up 
to the freer air, until, upon the summit of a 
ridge, I reached the clear sunshine, and could 
see the emerging ranges of hills to the east and 
south and the white mist resting motionless on 
the valley below. 
9 



130 THE WORKERS 

Up and up I climbed into higher altitudes. 
Each elevation appeared, as I approached it, the 
topmost crest of the mountain, and yet I gained 
it only to find another rough steep beyond. 

There could scarcely have been a sharper con- 
trast with the journey of the previous day. The 
graceful undulations of rich farm -lands and the 
broad plain of the Huguenot flats, checkered 
with field and forest and pasture, and traversed 
by well-kept roads, and dotted over with the 
buildings of prosperous farms and thriving vil- 
lages, had given place, in the panorama of my 
journey, to rugged mountains, steep and densely 
wooded, except where, on some less hopeless site 
at the very margin of cultivation, a settler had 
cleared the land and begun a conflict with the 
stony soil in an almost desperate struggle for a 
living. Here were mountain-roads that went 
from bad to worse, until, before I had crossed 
the range, my way degenerated into a narrow, 
rocky trail, overgrown with weeds, and along 
which I walked for a stretch of six or eight 
miles without passing a dwelling. 

That was in the afternoon. At a little before 
twelve o'clock I had come to Shohola Falls. 
There, in a " hollow " on the bank of a mountain- 
stream, stood a saw-mill, surrounded by piles of 
bleaching boards and a few rough, unpainted 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 131 

cottages. Through the open door of a shop I 
caught sight of an old carpenter bending over 
his bench. He entered very readily into direc- 
tions about the way and told me that I had but 
to follow a direct road to Kimble, and from 
there there was no difficulty in the way to Taf- 
ton, which, he said, was as far as I could get 
that day. Then, with an eye on my pack, he 
asked pointedly what I was peddling. The for- 
gotten magazines recurred to me and I opened 
my pack and handed him a copy. The frequent 
change of subject and the variety of illustration 
fixed for a time his excited attention. 

Half a score of young children now crowded 
about the door, and edged cautiously into the 
shop, fixing upon me eyes wide open with the 
hunger of curiosity. They were all barefooted 
and ragged, and not one of them was clean, and 
at a single glance you saw that, mountain-bred 
and young as they were, there was no whole- 
some color in their faces, and that the very 
beauty of childhood was already fading before a 
persistent diet from the frying-pan. 

The old carpenter presently turned upon me 
with the air of one who was master of the situ- 
ation. 

""Would you like to sell some of them books 
around here? " he asked. 



Y62 THE WORKERS 

I told him that I should. 

"Well, you're a stranger here, ain't you? " 

"Yes." 

"Then don't you try it. A young fellow done 
this place out of more'n fifty dollars last spring, 
and we're kind o' careful of strangers now." 

I sat on the door-step to rest, and invited the 
children to look at the pictures, which they did, 
hesitatingly at first, with timid advances, in 
which curiosity struggled with their fear of the 
unfamiliar. But they grew bolder as I invented 
stories to match the illustrations, and presently 
they were all nestling about me in the ease of 
absorbed attention. One little girl of four or 
five, who had eyed me at first with an anx- 
ious look of alarm, now stood leaning over my 
shoulder with an arm about my neck, and her 
soft brown hair, escaped from her sun -bon- 
net, touching my face, while she looked down 
upon the pictures, and I could feel her breath 
quickening as the story neared its climax. 

I pressed on presently, and the children ran 
by my side, asking for yet one story more, and 
finally calling their good-byes and waving their 
hands to me as I disappeared around a curve in 
the road. 

A few miles farther on I came to a lonely farm- 
house, where I knocked in quest of a dinner. 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 133 

The open door revealed a woman's face, so sad 
and worn, so full of care and of weary years of 
slavish drudgery, that quite instinctively I be- 
gan to apologize, and to conceal my real pur- 
pose in aimless inquiry about the way. 

"I do not know," she said; "but won't you 
come in ? The boys will soon be at home for 
dinner, and they can tell you." 

Her voice was soft and sweet, and her man- 
ner so reassuring that I gladly followed her 
into the sitting-room, where she introduced me 
to her daughter, a slender, dark young woman, 
who sat sewing by an open window. 

I hastened to make myself known as a work- 
man on my way to Wilkesbarre, where I hoped 
to get employment, and I told them of my en- 
counter with the carpenter at the Falls. They 
smiled as though the flavor of his humor was 
not lost to them, and they spoke of other char- 
acters at the settlement quite as odd as he. 

Both women were dressed in the plainest 
calico, and without a touch of ornament, and the 
house was poor ; poor to the verge of poverty ; 
but the walls were free from chromoes and 
worsted mottoes, and showed, instead, a few 
good engravings, and the rag-carpet on the floor 
blent in accordant colors, and curtains hung 
neatly at the windows. 



134 THE WORKERS 

Dinner was waiting, and presently the mother 
said that we would delay it no longer for the 
boys. We sat down at a table in a rough shed 
which opened from the sitting-room. A spot- 
less cloth covered the board, and the service was 
simple and tasteful, and there was the uncom- 
mon luxury of napkins. The dinner moved with 
unembarrassed ease. We talked of the surround- 
ing country, and its resemblance to other re- 
gions, and of the political situation. The mother 
led the talk, and tactfully guarded it from any 
approach to silence or to topics too intimate. 
Once, however, she touched lightly upon a 
former home in a prosperous corner of another 
State, and instantly I felt the hint of some 
family tragedy. 

And now her two sons came shuffling in, 
rough and ruddy from their work, clean-cut, 
well-bred young fellows, far too young I thought 
to be " hauling logs," and I could read an agony 
of anxiety in their mother's face as she watched 
them wearily take their seat on the vacant bench 
by the table. They had been left in the care of 
the work in the absence of their father, who had 
gone some miles to a neighboring settlement, 
" on business," their mother added, blushing 
deeply, while the boys looked hard at their 
plates. 



A HIRED MAN" AT AN - ASYLUM 135 

The afternoon's tramp lay through the wild- 
est part of that wild region. From Shohola 
Falls to Kimble the direct road is one which 
leads straight across the mountain, and is almost 
unbroken, and seldom used. In all its course I 
passed but two or three farms ; and these re- 
vealed a pitiful poverty, in the wretched hovels 
which did service as farm-houses and barns, and, 
more plainly, if possible, in the squalor of little 
children who gaped at me from among high 
weeds behind tottering fences. 

On I went for miles, over a road so lonely 
that it recalled the loneliness of the sea, and, 
like the sea, the sweep of heaving mountains 
seemed unbroken in a boundless monotony. 
And then the landscape had in it the beauty and 
the majesty of the sea, and the whispering of 
the wind over vast fields of stunted pines and 
scrub oaks answered to the wash of waves, and 
bore a fragrance and freshness to match with 
ocean breezes. 

Late in the afternoon my way descended 
abruptly by a more frequented road in the di- 
rection of Kimble. Presently I could see a rail- 
way and a canal, and I felt a little, I fancied, 
as an explorer must upon emerging, once more, 
into the region of the explored. 

I wished to know the distance and the way to 



136 THE WORKERS 

Tafton, and so I inquired of the first person 
whom I met. She was a milkmaid, and so 
picturesque a figure, that I felt a pleasurable ex- 
citement in the chance of a word with her. Her 
calico skirt was tucked up a little at one side. 
Under one bare arm she carried a milking-stool, 
and a bucket in the other hand. Her sun-bon- 
net had fallen from her head, and hung like a 
scholar's hood on her back. The sunlight was 
playing in glory about her face and in her abun- 
dant auburn hair. 

My excitement suddenly took another form ; 
for, as I lifted my hat in apologetic inquiry, 
there fell about me a shower of oak-leaves, which 
I had placed in the crown for the sake of added 
coolness. 

The milkmaid had met me with a clear, frank 
look between the eyes ; but she shrank a little 
now, and could not resist a startled glance, full 
of questioning, as to what further my hat might 
contain, and she answered me more with the 
purpose, I fancy, of being quickly rid of a wan- 
derer of such doubtful mind, than of adding to 
his information. 

The walk from Kimble to Tafton, I presently 
found, could be shortened by taking a path 
through the forest ; and I was soon panting up 
the hillside, grateful for the long twilight which 






A HIKED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 137 

promised to see me safe, before the darkness, to 
my destination. 

On the way I fell in with a young quarryman, 
whose home was near Tafton, and who willingly 
became my guide. He was only sixteen, but 
already he had worked for four years at his 
trade. His gaunt, angular body showed plainly 
the marks of arrested development, when the 
growth of the boy had hardened prematurely 
into an almost deformed figure of a confirmed 
laborer. 

He lunged clumsily beside me, and was in- 
clined to be taciturn at first; but he warmed 
presently to readier speech, and talked frankly 
of his work and manner of life. At twelve he 
had been taken from school and sent to the 
quarry to help his father support a growing 
family. And then his days had settled into a 
ceaseless round of hard work, from which there 
was no escape for him until he should be twenty- 
one, an age which appeared to his perception at 
an almost infinite distance. 

His attitude to his present circumstances was 
not a resentful one. He seemed to think it 
most natural that he should help in the family 
support ; or, rather, no other possibility seemed 
to occur to him. It was soon apparent, too, that 
his chiefest hope and ambition, with reference 



138 THE WORKERS 

to his ultimate freedom from that necessity, were 
centred in a possible return to school advan- 
tages. He spoke of his efforts to study after 
work hours, and of the hardness of such a course, 
and owned to the fear of insurmountable difficul- 
ties in the future. His reticence was gone now, 
and he was speaking with hearty freedom, and 
with his eyes all alight with the dream of his 
life. I told him something of the increased op- 
portunities of education for men who must make 
their own way, and of how many men I had 
known who had supported themselves through 
college. 

We parted at the edge of the forest, where we 
reached his home, a frail shell of a shanty, 
standing upon stumps of felled trees, and he 
was welcomed by the sight of his mother, chop- 
ping wood at the roadside, and a troop of ragged 
children playing about the open door. 

At nightfall, on the next evening, I entered 
Wilkesbarre, but I got so far only by^ virtue of 
a long lift in a farmer's cart, which carried me, 
by a stroke of great good fortune, over much the 
longest part of the day's journey. 

So far my plan had been carried out. It was 
Friday evening, and I was safe in Wilkesbarre, 
somewhat worn by the walk of rather over eighty 
miles, and with an increased dislike for my bur- 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 139 

densome pack, but with every prospect of being 
fit for work so soon as I should find it. My 
success in that direction had been so uniform, 
that instead of sleeping in the open, as I had 
done on the night before, I allowed myself the 
luxury of a bed in a cheap boarding-house, and 
a supper and a breakfast at its table, before be- 
ginning my search. Further good fortune 
awaited me, for Saturday morning lent itself 
with cheerful brightness to the enterprise. At 
an early hour I stepped out into a busy street of 
the city, sore and stiff with walking, but high 
of hope, and not without a certain elevation of 
spirit, which might have warned me of a fall. 

Work on the city sewers was being carried 
through the public square. I found the con- 
tractor, and applied for work as a digger. Very 
courteously he took the pains, to explain to me 
that he was obliged to keep on hand, and pay 
for full time, a force of men far larger than was 
demanded, except by certain exigencies, and 
that he could not increase their number. Not 
far from the square another gang of workmen 
were laying the curbstones and repairing the 
street, but here I was again refused. I lifted 
my eyes to the site of a stone building that was 
nearing completion, and there, too, no added 
hands were needed. 



140 THE WORKERS 

By this time I had neared the post-office, and 
I found letters awaiting me there which claimed 
the next half hour. But even more embarras- 
sing, as a check to further search, was a free 
reading-room, which now invited me to files of 
New York newspapers, in which I knew that I 
should find details of recent interesting political 
developments at Rochester and Saratoga, not 
to mention possible fresh complications in the 
more exciting game of politics abroad. I went 
in, and like Charles Kingsley's young monk, 
Philemon, who, wandering one day farther than 
ever before from the monastery in the desert, 
chanced upon the ruins of an old Egyptian tem- 
ple ; and mindful of a warning against such se- 
duction, yet guiltily charmed by the rare beauty 
of the frescoes, prayed aloud, " Lord, turn away 
mine eyes, lest they behold vanity," but looked, 
nevertheless — I looked, too, and I read on until 
mounting remorse robbed the reading of all 
pleasure and drove me to my task again. 

But I had fallen once ; and, by a sad fatality, 
scarcely had I renewed the search, with weak- 
ened power of resistance, when I stumbled upon 
a fiercer temptation in the form of a library, 
which announced in plain letters its freedom to 
the public until the hour of nine in the evening. 

Forgetful of my character as a workman; 






A HIKED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 141 

miserably callous to the claim of duty to find 
employment, if possible; and in any case, to 
live honestly the life which I had assumed, I 
entered the wide-open, hospitable doors, and 
was soon lost to other thought, and even to 
the sense of shame, in the absorbing interest 
of favorite books. 

In the lonely tramp across the mountains of 
Pike County I walked sometimes for miles with 
no opportunity of quenching a growing thirst, 
when suddenly I came upon a mountain-spring 
that trickled from the solid rock, and formed a 
little pool in its shade, where I threw myself on 
the ground, and, with a glorious sense of relief, 
drank deeply of its cold water. The analogy is 
a weak one, for the physical relief and the mo- 
mentary pleasure but faintly suggest the pro- 
longed intellectual delight, after two months of 
unslackened thirst. 

Here was an inexhaustible supply, and there 
were polite librarians who responded cheerfully 
to your slightest wish ; and, best of all, there 
was an inner door which disclosed a reading- 
room, where perfect quiet reigned, and comfort- 
able chairs invited you to grateful ease, and 
shelves on shelves of books were free to your 
eager hand. 

To pass from one writer to another, among 



142 THE WORKERS 

the volumes that lay on the table, lingering 
over long-loved passages, or dipping lightly here 
and there, absorbing pleasure from the very 
touch of the book and the sight of the well- 
printed page, held by the charm of some char- 
acteristic phrase, and finally to sink into the 
folds of an easy-chair with a store of books with- 
in ready reach — what delight can equal such sat- 
isfaction of a craving sense ? 

There through the livelong day I sit, and 
through the early evening, until I am roused by 
the sound of slamming shutters which is the 
janitor's signal for nine o'clock, the hour of clos- 
ing for the night. 

Taking my hat and stick I walk out into the 
gas-lit street, and into our modern world, with 
its artificialities and its social and labor prob- 
lems ; and I remember that I am a proletaire out 
of. a job, and that with shameless neglect of 
duty I have been idling through priceless hours. 
Crestfallen, I hurry to my boarding-house, long- 
ing, like any conscious-stricken inebriate, to lose 
remorse in sleep. 

As I walk to my lodgings a certain fellow-feel- 
ing warms me with fresh sympathy for my kind. 
I have met with my first reverse, not a serious 
one, but still the search for work for the first 
time in my experience has been fruitless through 



A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM 143 

most of a morning. Instead of persevering in- 
dustriously, I yield weakly to the desire to for- 
get my present lot, and the duty it entails, i*i 
the intoxication that beckons to me from free 
books. That happens to be my temptation, and 
I fall. 

Another workman of my class, in precisely my 
position, encounters, not one chance temptation 
which he might escape by taking another street, 
but at every corner open doors w T hich invite him 
to the companionship of other men, who will 
help him to forget his discouragements so long 
as his savings last. And as we are both turned 
into the street at night, in what do we differ as 
regards our moral strength? He yielded to his 
temptation, and I to mine. 



CHAPTEE V 

A FARM HAND 

WlLLIAMSPORT, LYCOMING COUNTY, Pa., 

Saturday, 3 October, 1891. 

From Wilkesbarre it was an easy day's march 
to tlie village of Pleasant Hill, which lies in the 
way to Williamsport. The only notable incident 
of the tramp was one which confirmed me in an 
early formed policy. I have avoided railways, 
and have walked in preference along the country 
roads, as affording better opportunities of inter 
course with people. But in going on that morn- 
ing from Wilkesbarre to the ferry which crossed 
the river to Plymouth, I took the advice of a 
gate-keeper at a railway crossing and started 
down the track on a long trestle as a short cut 
to the ferry. All went well until I was half way 
over, and then two coal trains passed simul- 
taneously in opposite directions, and I hung by 
my hands from the framework at one side, while 
the engineer and fireman on the locomotive 
nearest me laughed heartily at the figure that 
I cut, with the side of each car grazing my 

144 



A FARM HAND 145 

pack, and my hold on the railing growing visibly 
slacker. 

It was a little after nightfall when I reached 
the tavern at Pleasant Hill. Of my wages I had 
fifty cents left. I questioned the proprietor as 
to the demand for work in his community. He 
was quite encouraging. Only that afternoon, he 
said, one of the best farmers of the neighbor- 
hood had been inquiring in the village for a pos- 
sible man, and to the best of his knowledge 
he had not found one. I said that I should 
apply at his farm in the morning, and then 
I broached the subject of entertainment. We 
soon struck a bargain for a supper and break- 
fast, and the privilege of a bed on the hay; 
but when, after supper, I asked to be directed 
to the barn, the landlord silently led the way 
to a little room upstairs, and there wished me 
good-night. 

In the early morning he pointed out to me the 
road to his neighbor's farm, which I followed 
with ready success. I was penniless now, and 
had only an uncertain chance of work. And 
then, if the farmer should ask me, I should be 
obliged to own to inexperience, and the demand 
for farm-hands I thought must be limited, at a 
date so far into the autumn. But the morning 
was exquisite, and the buoyancy that it bred was 
10 



146 THE WORKERS 

an easy match for misgivings, so that it was with 
a light heart that I turned from the road into 
a lane which leads to the house of the farmer, 
whom I shall call Mr. Hill. 

All about me were the marks of thrift. The 
fences stood straight and stout, with an air of 
lasting security. On a rising ledge above the 
lane was the farm-house, a small, unpainted 
wooden cottage, bleached to the rich, deep brown 
of a well-colored meerschaum pipe, and as snug 
and tight as a pilot's schooner. Near it was a 
summer-kitchen that seemed fairly to glow with 
conscious pride in its cleanness, and the very 
foot-path from the gate to the cottage-door was 
swept like a threshing floor. 

On the door-step sat a girl in a calico dress of 
delicate pink, with a dark gingham apron con- 
cealing all its front. She was shelling peas into 
a milk-pan which rested on her lap, and the 
morning sunlight was in her flaxen hair, and 
showed you the delicate freshness of a pink-and- 
white complexion. Sober hazel eyes were fixed 
on me as I walked up the foot-path, and of us two 
I was the embarrassed one. I have not got over 
a certain timidity in asking for work, and each 
request is a sturdy effort of the will, with the 
rest of me in cowardly revolt, and a timid 
shrinking much in evidence I fear. 



A FARM HAND 147 

"Is this Mr. Hill's farm?" I ask, and I 
know that I am blushing deeply. 

"Yes," says the young woman, with grave 
dignity and the most natural self-possession in 
the world. 

"Is he at home?" I am sweating freely 
now, as I stand with my hat crushed between 
my hands, and the pack feeling like a mountain 
on my back. 

" He is down at the pond on the edge of the 
farm." And her serious eyes follow the line of 
the long lane which sinks from the house with 
the downward slope of the land. 

"With her permission I leave the pack behind, 
and then follow the indicated way. The barn is 
on my right, a large, unpainted structure, stained 
by weather to as dark a hue as the house, but 
there are no loose boards about it, nor any rifts 
among the shingles, and the doors hang true on 
their hinges, and meet in well-adjusted touch. 
The cowyard and the pigsty flank the lane, and 
the neatness of the yard and the tightness of the 
troughs make clear that there is no waste of fod- 
der there. Farther down and on my left is the 
wagon-house, as good a building almost as the 
cottage, and with much the same clean, strong 
compactness. There are no ploughs nor other 
farming tools lying exposed to the weather, no 



148 THE WORKERS 

signs of idle capital wasting with the wear of 
rust, but everywhere the active, thrifty strength 
of wise economy. 

Two men are at work at the pond, and I pick 
my man at once. They are plainly brothers, but 
the Mr. Hill of whom I am in search is the 
stronger-looking man, and is clearly in command 
of the job. I am reminded of a certain type 
which one comes to know on "the street," a 
clean-cut, vigorous man, who keeps his youth 
till sixty, and who, for many years, has had a 
masterful, compelling hand upon the conduct of 
affairs, has put railways through the "West, and 
opened up mining regions, and knows the inner 
workings of legislatures and of much else 
besides. 

I wait for a pause in the work, and try to 
screw my courage to the sticking-point ; and 
then I tell Mr. Hill that the landlord at the tav- 
ern has sent me to him in the belief that he 
needs a man, and I add that I shall be glad of a 
job. "Without preliminary questions Mr. Hill 
engages me on the spot, and makes me an offer 
of board and lodging, and seventy-five cents 
a day, which, he says, is the usual rate on 
the farms at that season. I close with the bar- 
gain, and ask to be set to work immediately. A 
minute later I am walking up the lane with a 



A FARM HAND 149 

message for Mrs. Hill, to the effect that I am 
the new "hired man," and that she will please 
give me,, to take to the pond, a certain " broad 
hoe " from the wagon-house. 

Mrs. Hill understands the situation at once ; 
she makes no comment, but goes with me to the 
wagon -house, where she points out the hoe 
among other tools in a corner. She has said 
nothing so far, and I feel a little uncomfortable, 
but now she turns to me with a frank directness 
of manner that is very reassuring. 

" I ain't got no room for you in the house, but 
I guess you'll be comfortable sleeping out here. 
You can fetch your grip, and I'll show you your 
bed." 

Pack in hand, I follow her up the steps to the 
loft of the wagon-house, and she points to a cot 
near the farther window and a wooden chair be- 
side it. " Some time to-day I'll make up your 
bed, and if there's anything you want you can 
tell me." This is her final word as she leaves 
me to return to the house. I slip on my over- 
alls and take note of my new quarters. Win- 
dows at both ends of the loft provide ample 
ventilation. The cot is covered with a corn- 
husk mattress, as clean and fresh as a cock of 
new hay. The very floor is free from dust. 
The rafters hang thick with bunches of seed- 



150 THE WORKEES 

corn on the cob, with their outer husks removed 
and the inner husks drawn back and neatly in- 
terwoven, the whole effect suggesting stalactites 
in a cave. The air is fragrant with the perfume 
from slices of apples, that are closely threaded 
and hung up to dry in graceful festoons from 
rafter to rafter. 

Five minutes later I am at work at the pond. 
The pond is an artificial one, created by a 
wooden dam. The water has been allowed to 
flow out, and the old woodwork is to be re- 
newed. 

My immediate task is to dig a ditch along the 
outer side of the rotting planks, so that they 
can be removed and replaced by new ones. I 
am soon alone on the job, for the farmers' work 
calls them elsewhere. The experience in the 
sewer-difcch at Middletown is all to my credit, 
and my spirits rise with the discovery that I can 
handle my pick and shovel more effectively, and 
with less sense of exhaustion. And then the 
stint is my own, and no boss stands guard over 
me as a dishonest workman. At least I am con- 
scious of none, and I am working on merrily, 
when suddenly I become aware of my employer 
bending over the ditch and watching me in- 
tently. 

It is a face very red with the heat and much 



A FARM HAISTD 151 

bespattered with mud, into which my tools sink 
gurglingly, that I turn up to him. 

" How are you getting on ? " 

" Pretty well, thank you." 

" You mustn't work too hard. All that I ask 
of a man is to work steady. Have an apple ? " 

He is gone in a moment, and I stand in the 
ditch eating the apple with immense relish, and 
thinking what a good sort that farmer is, and 
how thoroughly he understands the principle of 
getting his best work out of a man ! He has ap- 
pealed to my sense of honor by intrusting the 
job to me, and now he has won me completely 
to his interests by showing concern in mine. 

The work is hard, and the morning hours 
are very long, but the labor achieves its own sat- 
isfaction as the task grows under one's self-di- 
rected effort, and there is no torture of body and 
soul in the surveillance of a slave-driving boss. 

But I am thoroughly tired and very hungry 
when Mr. Hill calls to me from across the pond 
that it is time to go to dinner. I join him in 
haste, and we walk up the lane together, while 
he drives his team before him, and points out 
with evident pride the young colts and other 
stock in the pasture. 

On a bench near the door of the summer- 
kitchen are two tin basins full of water, and 



152 THE WORKERS 

there we wash ourselves, drawing by means of a 
gourd-dipper from a brimming bucket near by 
any fresh supply of water that we want. A 
coarse, clean towel hangs over a roller above 
the bench, and at this we take our turns. 

The dinner is a quiet meal, and tends to so- 
lemnity. Mrs. Hill and her daughter sit oppo- 
site the farmer and me. Little is said, but for 
me there is absorbing interest in the meal itself. 
It is worthy of the best traditions of country 
life, clean in all its appointments to a degree 
of spotlessness, really elegant in its quiet sim- 
plicity, and appetizing? — how was I ever to 
stop eating those potatoes that spread under the 
pressure of my fork into a mass of flaky deli- 
ciousness, or the ears of sweet-corn fresh from 
a late field, or the green peas that swim in a 
sweet stew of their own brewing, or, best of all, 
the little pond pickerel that are grilled to a crisp 
brown turn? 

In our more artificial forms of living we 
habitually eat when we are not hungry, and 
drink when we are not thirsty, and we know lit- 
tle of the sheer physical delight in meat and 
drink when our natures seize joyously upon the 
means of life, and organs work in glad adapta- 
tion to function, and the organism, in full revi- 
val, responds to its environment ! 



A FARM HAND 153 

The work moves uninterruptedly in the after- 
noon ; and at six o'clock, as I wearily drag my 
feet along the lane by the farmer's side, I can 
see his daughter driving the cattle through the 
pasture to the cowyard, and I wonder how I 
shall fare at the evening milking. But I am not 
put to that test ; for the farmer declines my offer 
of help, with the explanation that, under our ar- 
rangement, my day's work is done at six o'clock, 
and that he is not entitled to further help, nor 
does he need it, he adds, for his wife and daugh- 
ter always lend a hand at the chores. 

Supper is almost a repetition of dinner, with 
a pitcher of rich milk kindly pressed upon me 
when I decline the tea, and with apple-sauce 
and cake in the place of pumpkin-pie. Soon 
after, I am lighting my way with a lantern 
through the dark to my cot in the loft, and for 
ten hours I sleep the sleep of a child, and 
awake at six in the morning to the farmer's 
call of "John, hey John!" from under the 
window. 

All of that day, which was Wednesday, was 
given to completing the work on the dam. The 
necessary excavation was soon finished, and 
then we laid the timbers, and nailed the new 
planks into place, and filled in and packed the 
earth behind them. Over the completed job the 



154 THE W0EKEES 

farmer expressed such a depth of satisfaction 
that I felt a glow of pride in the work, and a 
sense of proprietorship, which was splendidly 
compensating for the effort which it had cost. 

The remaining three days of the week we 
spent in picking apples. Behind the wagon- 
house was an orchard. Mr. Hill first selected a 
tree, and then we placed under it the number of 
empty barrels, which, in his judgment, corre- 
sponded to its yield, a judgment which was al- 
ways singularly accurate. Then, each supplied 
with a half-bushel basket with a wooden hook 
attached to the handle, we next climbed among 
the branches, and suspending our baskets, we 
carefully picked the apples with a quick upward 
turn of the fruit, which detached them at the 
point at which the stem was fast to the twig. 
Both baskets were usually full at about the same 
moment, and then we took turns in climbing 
down and receiving the baskets from the tree, 
and emptying the apples into the barrels with 
great caution against possible bruising. 

All this was Arcadian in its joyous simplicity. 
All day we moved among the boughs, breathing 
the fragrance of ripened fruit and the mellow 
odor of apple-trees turning at the touch of frost ; 
picking ceaselessly the full-juiced apples " sweet- 
ened with the summer light," while above us 



A FARM HAND 155 

white clouds fled briskly before the northwest 
wind across the clear blue of the autumn sky ; 
and below us lay the pasture, where the patient 
cattle grazed, and beyond stretched open coun- 
try of field and forest, which, in that crystal air, 
met the horizon in a clean, sharp line. 

Mr. Hill and I were growing very chummy. 
A faint uncomfortable distrust of me, which I 
suspected through the first two days, had wholly 
disappeared. "We talked with perfect freedom 
now and with a growing liking for each other, 
which, for me, added vastly to the charm of 
those six days on the farm. 

I tried at first to lead the talk, and to draw 
Mr. Hill into expressions of his views of life, 
that I might learn his attitude toward modern 
progress, and catch glimpses of the growth of 
things from his point of view. But Mr. Hill was 
proof against such promptings. He was a 
shrewd, practical farmer, with a masterful hold 
upon all the details of his enterprise, and with a 
mind quickened by thrifty conduct of his own 
affairs to a catholic taste for information. His 
schooling had been limited, he said, but he must 
have meant his actual school training ; for life it- 
self had been his school, and admirably had he 
improved its advantages. He was a trained ob- 
server and a close student of actual events. In- 



156 THE WORKERS 

stead of my getting him to talk, he made me 
talk, but with so natural a force as to rob it of 
all thought of compulsion. 

The talk drifted early into politics, and I soon 
found that my light - hearted generalizations 
would not pass muster. Back and back he 
would press me upon the data of each induction, 
until I was forced to tell what I knew, or was 
confronted with my ignorance. 

And then he delighted in talk of other people 
than our own, and his knowledge of a somewhat 
general contemporaneous history was curiously 
varied and accurate. Stories of succeeding 
English ministries, and even of the short-lived 
French cabinets, were ready to his use, and he 
tactfully righted me in my errors. But he held 
me closest to my memories of things among the 
common people, the agricultural laborers in 
England, and their relation to the farmers, and 
theirs in turn to the landed proprietors, and the 
promise which the land could give of continued 
support to three classes, under the changed con- 
ditions of modern life. All that I could remem- 
ber of a typical laborer's home, and of its manner 
of life, and of the general aspect of an English 
farm, seemed only to whet his appetite, and to 
strengthen his demand for what I knew of the 
continental peasantry. His interest centred 



A FARM HAND 157 

strongly in the French, and there was plainly a 
peculiar charm for him in every detail which I 
could give of the French farmers, with their 
small holdings, and their inherited habits of 
thrift, and of the close culture of their lands. 
But he would even lead me on to speak of great 
cities, and of the life in them of the rich and 
poor, and of any signs, of which I knew, of grow- 
ing social discontent. And with an interest that 
never flagged, he questioned me on works of 
art ; and followed patiently, and with a zest that 
warmed one's own enthusiasm, through endless 
churches, and long dim galleries, and by nar- 
row, crooked streets of a modern city to the 
ruins of its distant past. And there we restored 
the crumbling piles, until there stood clear to 
his imagination a vision of Imperial Eome, and 
his eyes kindled to some great general's triumph 
moving through the Via Sacra, and the people 
swarming to the very chimney-tops, their infants 
in their arms, and on the air the deep, rich mov- 
ing roar of high acclaim ! > 

Sunday was the last day of my stay on the 
farm. When, in the middle of the week, I 
found that Mr. Hill was likely to keep me, I 
was conscience-stricken, because I had not told 
him that my stay would be short. He said 
nothing at first in reply to my announcement, 



158 THE WORKERS 

but presently remarked that it was very hard 
to get men in that part of the country. 

" But, surely," I said, " more men apply to 
you for work than you can possibly employ." 

He looked at me with some wonder, at my 
ignorance. 

" For a long time I have been looking for a 
man to help me," he said. " I'm growing old, 
and I can't do the work that I once did. If 
I could find the right man, I'd keep him the 
year round, and pay him good wages. But 
the best young fellows go to the cities, and the 
rest are mostly a worthless lot. There's hardly 
a day in the year when I haven't a job for any 
decent man who'll ask for it. I have to go look- 
ing for men, and then I generally can't find one 
that's any account." 

This was much the longest speech that he 
had made to me so far, and a very interesting 
one I thought it, and I am only sorry that I can- 
not reproduce the exact phraseology, with its 
Anglo-Saxon words set, by an instinctive choice, 
into rugged sentences which admirably ex- 
pressed the man. I waited hopefully for fur- 
ther speech from him, and at last it came, quite 
of its own accord ; for I had given up trying to 
draw him out. 

We were sitting together on Sunday evening 



A FAEM HAND 159 

on the platform of the pump in front of the 
farm-house. It had been a very restful Sunday. 
In the morning I went to the village church, 
where two services followed each other in quick 
succession. The first was a prayer-meeting, at- 
tended by a little company of farming people 
and village folk, who conscientiously parted 
company at the door on the basis of sex, and sat 
on opposite sides of a central aisle. 

The service was a simple one. The leader 
read a passage from the Bible, and offered 
prayer, and then gave out a hymn. When the 
singing ceased, one after another, the older men, 
with nervous pauses between, rose to " testify " or 
sank to their knees, and prayed aloud. I chiefly 
remember one as a typical figure — an old man, 
whose thick white hair mingled with a bushy 
beard that covered his face. I noticed him first 
in comfortable possession of a bench along 
which he stretched his legs. On his feet were 
loose carpet-slippers ; and with his shoulders 
braced against the wall, and his head thrown 
back, and his eyes closed, he looked the vision 
of physical ease, which matched the expression 
of deep contentment that he wore. There was 
no suspicion of sleep about him. Most evident- 
ly he followed with liveliest sympathy every 
word that was said or sung. I looked up pres- 



160 THE WORKERS 

ently at the sound of a new voice, and found 
the old man on his feet. He was adding his 
" testimony " to what had gone before, and was 
speaking rapidly in a deep, gruff voice with 
blunt articulation. There was a strong remind- 
er in the performance of a school-boy's " speak- 
ing his piece ;" the monotonous, unnatural tone; 
the rapid flow of conventional, committed 
phrase ; and the nervous tension, which com- 
municated itself to his hearers in a fear that he 
might forget. 

But there came at length, without calamity, 
the final " Pray for me that I may be kept 
faithful," and then he knelt in prayer. Invo- 
cations from the Prophets, and supplications 
from the Psalms, and glowing exhortations 
from the Epistles, were interwoven with strang- 
est interpolations of his own, while his voice 
rose and fell in regular cadences and he audibly 
caught his breath between. But he was losing 
himself in his devotion, and presently his voice 
fell to a natural tone, and his words grew plain 
and direct, as he held converse with the Al- 
mighty about our common life — of sin and its 
awful guilt, of temptation and its fateful trial, of 
suffering and its terrible reality, of sorrow and 
its cruel mystery. Then, as though quickened 
by the touch of truth, his faith rose on surer 



A FARM HAND 161 

wings, and his prayer breathed the sense of sin 
forgiven, and of life made strong by a power not 
our own, and of hope exultant in the knowledge 
" of that new life when sin shall be no more ! " 

A solemn stillness held us when he rose, and 
made us feel the presence in our common lot of 
things divine and that deep sacredness of life 
which awes us most. 

A short preaching service followed. The 
preacher drove up on the hour from another 
parish, and started off, at the meeting's end, for 
yet a third appointment. 

This is a long digression from Mr. Hill's talk 
of the evening, and I have said nothing yet of 
the afternoon. We took chairs out on the grass 
in front of the cottage, after dinner, and sat in 
the shade. We soon had visitors. Mr. Hill's 
brother and his wife walked up from the lower 
farm, and a little later there came Mr. Hill's son 
and his young bride. The son is a physician, 
whose practice covers much of that country-side ; 
and it was interesting to me to learn that his 
professional training was got at the College of 
Physicians and Surgeons in New York. 

Fearful of disturbing the family gathering, I 

drew off a little, and gave my attention to a 

book. Late in the afternoon I was roused by 

the coming of another guest. He was an old 
11 



162 THE WORKERS 

neighboring farmer out in search of a heifer 
which had broken through the pasture-fence. 
As he joined us he was speaking so swiftly and 
incoherently about the heifer's escape that I felt 
some doubt of his sanity, but he quieted down in 
a moment, and threw himself on the grass with 
the evident purpose of resting before resuming 
the search. He was lying flat upon his back, 
and his long bony fingers were clasped under 
his head. He wore no hat, nor coat, nor waist- 
coat, and a dark gingham shirt lay close to the 
sharp outlines of his almost fleshless body. 
Braces that were patched with strings passed 
over his lean shoulders, and were made fast to 
faded blue jeans, whose extremities were tucked 
into an old pair of cowhide boots. A long 
white beard rested on his breast, reaching al- 
most to his waist. Only a thin fringe of hair 
remained above his ears ; and over the skull the 
bare skin was so tightly drawn that you could 
almost trace the zigzagging junctures of the 
frontal and the cranium bones. 

But skeleton as he was, he was marvellously 
alive. His eyes were aflame, and prone as he 
lay and resting, he impressed you as a man 
so vitalized, that with a single movement 
he could be upon his feet and in intense ac- 
tivity. He was talking on about the heifer, 



A FAEM HAND 163 

nervously repeating to us, again and again, the 
details of where he had seen her last, and the 
rift which he had found in the fence, and how he 
had sent his hired man in one direction, and had 
gone in another himself. 

He was a rich farmer, Mr. Hill told me after- 
ward, and he lived alone, except for an occasional 
hired man whom he could induce to stay with 
him for a season. But even in his old age he 
worked on his farm with the strength and en- 
durance of three men, laying aside, year by year, 
his store of gain. Without a single human tie 
he worked on as though spurred by every claim 
of affection and the highest sense of responsi- 
bility to provide for those whom he loved ; and 
all the while a vast misanthropy grew upon him, 
and he would see less and less of his fellow-men, 
and an almost life-long scepticism hardened into 
downright unbelief. 

So far he had not noticed me; but now he 
turned my way, lifting himself upon his elbow, 
and fixing his sunken, burning eyes on mine, 
while the white hairs of his beard mingled with 
the blades of grass. 

11 You're hired out to Jim, ain't ye ? " 

Jim was his designation of Mr. Hill. 

« Yes," I said. 

"What's he payin' you?" 



164 THE WORKERS 

I told him. 

Mr. Hill was squirming in nervous discom- 
fort. 

" What's your name? " 

I gave it him. 

" "Where are you come from? " 

" Connecticut." 

"Connecticut? That's down South, ain't 
it?" 

"No, that's down East." 

" Was you raised there ? " 

I do not know into what particulars of my 
history and of my antecedents this process might 
have forced me had not the heifer come to my 
relief. She was a beautiful creature, with a 
clean sorrel coat, and wide, liquid, mischievous 
eyes ; and as she ran daintily over the turf at 
the side of the lane, saucily tossing her head, 
you knew that she was closely calculating every 
chance of dodging the gawky country boy who, 
breathing hard, lunged after her. 

Without a word of parting, and as abruptly 
as he came, the old man was gone to head her 
off in the right direction at the mouth of the 
lane. And so he disappeared, as strange a hu^ 
man being as the world holds, living tremendous- 
ly a life of strenuous endeavor, yet Godless and 
hopeless and loveless in it all, except for the 



A FARM HAND 165 

greedy love of gain, which holds him in miser- 
able bondage, as he works his life away. 

It was soon after supper that Mr. Hill and I 
sat down together on the platform of the pump. 
There was little movement in the air, and it 
was very mild for the twenty-seventh of Sep- 
tember. As the stars appeared, they shone 
upon us through a mellow warmth, like that of 
summer, in which they seem magically near, and 
one feels their calm companionship in human 
things. 

" And you've made up your mind to go in the 
morning ? " Mr. Hill began. 

"Yes," I said, "I must be off. I am truly 
sorry to go. But you surprise me by what you 
tell me of the difficulty in the country of getting 
men to work. One hears so much about 'the 
unemployed,' that any demand for labor, which 
remains unsupplied, seems to me an anomalous 
condition." * 

" That's a big question," he said, with a deep 
sigh, as he leant back against the pump and 
looked at me out of blue eyes that were gray 

* I have presented here, together with ideas advanced by 
Mr. Hill, others secured in fragmentary conversations with 
various farmers by the way. These ideas seem to me to rep- 
resent a body of accordant thinking. It is fair to say that 
I also found among the farmers quite another school of 
thought. This I shall try to present later with equal fulness. 



166 THE WORKERS 

and keen in the starlight. " It reminds me of 
what we used to call a hard example in arith- 
metic in the district school when I was a boy. 
There's a good many things you've got to take 
account of, if you work it out right, and there's 
a good many chances of mistake, and a mistake 
goes hard with your answer. I haven't worked 
this sum and I haven't seen it worked, but I've 
studied it a good while, and I think I know how 
to do parts of it." 

He paused for a moment and then went on : 
" In the last hundred and fifty years there have 
been great changes in the world in the ways of 
producing things — ' improved methods of pro- 
duction' the books call it. Some say it ain't 
really * improved,' only faster and cheaper, but 
I'm not arguing that point. The power of peo- 
ple to produce the necessaries of life is a big 
sight greater than it was a hundred and fifty 
years ago — that's my point. It's what the books 
call ' increased power of production.' And 
among civilized people there's been this in- 
crease of producing power in about all the 
forms of production. In some forms it's been 
very great, and in others not so great ; but I 
guess there ain't many kinds of business that 
haven't been changed by it. 

" Now, I think that the farming business has 



A FARM HAND 167 

lagged behind the rest. Not that there ain't 
been improvement, for there's been great im- 
provement. There's the steam-ploughs, and the 
reapers, and harvesters, and mowers, and the 
threshing-machines; and then there's the sci- 
ence of agricultural chemistry. But I'm judg- 
ing of what I know of the farming business as 
it's carried on. 

" Now, here's my farm : it's part of a tract 
that my great-grandfather settled on and cleared. 
I've heard my grandfather tell many a time of 
the Indians that were all about here when he 
was a boy, and even my father often went hunt- 
ing deer down on the lake this side of the 
woods. 

" Well, I know this country pretty well, and 
I find that a farmer now don't work any bigger 
farm than my grandfather did, nor the work isn't 
much lighter, nor he doesn't get much more for 
it. There's been a good many changes, but as 
the farming business goes, there ain't any in- 
creased production that's kept up with other 
kinds of business when you calculate how many 
farmers there are and how much they do. 

" I read in a book the other day that twenty- 
five men, with modern machinery, can produce 
as much cotton cloth as the whole population of 
Lancashire could produce in the old way ; but 



168 THE W0KKEKS 

there ain't any twenty-five men who could work 
the farms of this township with all the modern 
farming machinery. 

" Take it day in and day out the whole year 
round on the farms, and a man's work or a team's 
work is pretty much what it was a hundred 
years ago. 

" And here's another thing that makes a great 
difference between farming and other kinds of 
business. When I go to the city I most gener- 
ally visit some factory and go through it as 
carefully as I can. The machinery is interest- 
ing and wonderful, and if it's something useful 
they're making, I like to compare the productive 
power of the factory hands with what it would 
be if they were all working separately by the old 
methods. But besides this, there's the wonder- 
ful economy that I see. The factory is built so 
as to save all the carting that's possible, and 
there's men always studying how they can make 
it more convenient, and can improve the ma- 
chinery and cut down the costs. And then I 
don't find any leakage anywhere that can be 
helped ; and it's most wonderful what they do 
in some kinds of manufacturing with what you'd 
think was the very refuse, working it up into 
some by-product that makes the difference be- 
tween profit and loss in the whole business. It's 



A FARM HAND 169 

close culture of the closest kind applied to manu- 
facture. 

" Sometimes I've had a chance to talk to a 
superintendent of a factory, and he's told me 
about the business from the inside — how care- 
fully he must study the market and how closely 
he must calculate a hundred things; and how 
exactly his books must be kept, and how easy 
it is for a little thing that's been miscalculated 
or overlooked to ruin the business. 

"I tell you that I've come to see pretty clearly 
that the business that pays in these times of 
competition is a powerful lucky one and power- 
ful well managed. "When the year's work is 
done and the wages have been paid, and the rent 
and the interest on the capital paid up, and the 
salaries paid to the brains that run the thing, 
it's a remarkable business that's got anything 
over in the way of profit. 

" Now, the farming business, as I look at it, 
is a long way behind all that. "We don't know 
much about close culture in farming in Amer- 
ica, and I don't believe there's one farmer in 
five hundred that keeps books and can tell you 
exactly where he stands ; and these things we've 
got to learn. It's terrible easy to let things go 
their own way pretty much — until the fences 
are falling down and your buildings are out of 



170 THE WORKERS 

repair, and your tools are going to ruin with rust, 
and your children are not having good advan- 
tages. You may think that you're too poor to 
afford anything different and that it's economy 
to live so. But it ain't ; it's the worst kind of 
waste. It takes a sight of hard work, brain- 
work, and handwork, too, to get good, substan- 
tial buildings and fences, and tools and stock, 
and to keep them good and to raise your chil- 
dren well. You've got to make a close calcula- 
tion on every penny, but it's the only true econ- 
omy. The difference between the economy of 
shabbiness and the economy of thrift is the dif- 
ference between waste and saving. 

" My father could not give me much school 
learning, but he learnt me to farm it thoroughly. 
I've been at it a good many years now, and I 
know by experience the truth of what he taught 
me. If there's ever been anything more than 
our living at the end of the year, it's only be- 
cause we all worked hard, my wife and daughter 
as hard in the house as me and my son on the 
farm ; and because we studied to raise the best 
of everything we could, and to get the best 
prices we could, and we saved every penny that 
could be saved. 

" My son wanted to study to be a doctor when 
he was growing up, and so I gave him the best 



A FARM HAND 171 

schooling that he could get around here ; and 
when he was old enough, and I saw his mind 
was made up, I sent him to the best medical 
college I could find. And I've given my daughter 
all the schooling she's had the strength for. It's 
the best economy to get the best, whether it's 
buildings, or tools, or stock, or education ; and 
there's a great deal more satisfaction in it be- 
sides. I tell you this because it's my experience, 
and I know it, but I owe it mainly to the raising 
my father gave me. It's hard work, and it's 
hard study, and it's awful careful economy in 
little things as well as big, that makes a man 
succeed in any business. 

" You've heard the saying that ' the luxuries of 
one generation are the necessities of the next.' 
That's certainly true in the country. I've heard 
my grandfather say that when he was a boy it 
didn't take more than ten dollars a year to pay 
for everything that the family bought. All that 
they wore and ate and drank they raised on the 
farm, and they built their own buildings, and 
made their own tools, mostly, and worked out 
most of their taxes. 

" I'm not saying that farmers must go back 
to that. It ain't possible. It's every way bet- 
ter now to buy your cloth than to make it, and 
so with your tools, and many other things ; but 



172 THE WORKERS 

when I se© a farmer's family spend in a year for 
clothes and feathers and finery as much as ten 
families did for all they bought in the old days, 
and at the same time their fences are falling and 
their stock suffering from neglect, I see that 
these people don't know their business. And 
when I see a farmer mortgage a piece of land 
to give his daughter a fashionable wedding, and 
then complain that there ain't a living to be 
made any more in farming, I'm sorry for him. 

" You see, in the old days the ways of farming 
were primitive and simple, and the ways of liv- 
ing were primitive and simple, too, and they 
matched each other. Now both have changed. 
Farming is different, and living in the country is 
different. The style of living in the country is 
copied from the towns, where there's been the 
greatest increase of producing power ; and I 
argue that the increase of producing power on 
the farms hasn't by any means kept up to what 
it is in the cities. 

" Now, this difference ain't unnatural. Every- 
body knows that the big fortunes of the last hun- 
dred years have mostly been made in manufact- 
ure in the cities, and in the increase of land val- 
ues in the cities, and in the development of rail- 
roads and mines. And where the big fortunes 
have been made, there's been the best chances 



A FARM HAND 173 

for brains and energy and enterprise. And 
where brains and energy and enterprise are at 
work, there all kinds of labor will go, for it's 
these that make employment for labor. 

"Now, it ain't saying anything against farmers 
to say that the best brains that have been born 
on the farms for the last hundred years haven't 
stayed on the farms. The farming business 
hasn't had the benefit of them, but they've gone 
to the professions, and the business in the cities, 
where the most money was to be made. 

" So that through all this time of ' increasing 
power of production ' there's been a constant 
drain from the country of its best brains and 
blood, and it ain't strange that the farming busi- 
ness has lagged behind the others which these 
have gone into. 

" I believe there's going to be a change. I 
believe the change is begun. Competition is so 
keen now in about all kinds of business, that 
the chances of making a fortune and making it 
quick are very few. There's about so much in- 
terest to be got for your capital, and if the 
security is good, the interest is very low, and 
there's about so much to be got for your brains, 
unless you've got particular rare brains ; and as 
the competition grows keener, brains begin to 
see that there's about as much to be made out of 



174 THE WORKERS 

farming as out of other kinds of business. In- 
vention has done a lot already, and when the 
same economy and thrift and thorough business 
principles are used in farming as are used in other 
kinds of production, the farming business will 
soon catch up with the others. And where the 
brains and enterprise and energy go, labor will 
soon follow ; and for a time anyway, there won't 
be as many unemployed in the cities, nor as many 
farmers in the country looking for men to work. 
But why are there unemployed in the cities, 
while there is already a demand for men in the 
country? Why, because many of the unem- 
ployed ain't fit for us to take into our homes as 
hired men, and many don't know that there's 
such a chance for them, and many if they do 
know, would sooner starve in the cities than 
work and live on a farm. I've got an idea that 
when the farming business is developed, there'll 
be a big change in country life. "Where there's 
plenty of brains and push and enterprise, there's 
likely to be excitement. 

" But it's got to come naturally ; you can't 
pump interest into country living by legislation. 
I had to laugh the other day when I was read- 
ing a speech that Mr. John Morley made in 
Manchester, I think it was. Anyway, he was 
arguing for parish councils, and he said that 



A FARM HAND 175 

this ' gregarious instinct ' that makes country 
people flock into towns that are already over- 
crowded, is something that we ought to counter- 
act by making country life more interesting, and 
he thought that parish councils would help to 
do that. Lord Salisbury got into him pretty 
well a short time after, when he said in a speech 
that he never had thought it was the duty of 
the government to provide amusement for the 
people, but if lie was making a suggestion in 
that line, he would like to recommend the circus. 
" There's another reason besides the keen com- 
petition in other kinds of business that makes 
me think that farming is going to be brought up 
to the others, and that is, that so many of the 
colleges are teaching scientific farming. You 
ain't going to see any very great result from this 
in a year, nor in ten years, for there's a pretty 
big field to work on. But when smart young 
fellows that are raised in the country, and other 
smart young fellows that see a good chance to 
make something at farming — when they all get a 
thorough training in scientific farming, and when 
they all get down to work, just as they would in 
some other highly developed form of production, 
you will see results. There w r on't be much in 
shiftless farming when the scientific kind pretty 
generally sets the pace. 



176 THE W0EKEES 

" I've read a good deal, of late years, about 
i organized charities ' in the cities, and it cer- 
tainly does seem as if charity was a good deal 
more sensible than it used to be. It's hard to 
see how there can be any kind of serious desti- 
tution in the cities that ain't got some society to 
relieve it. And the rich in the cities do cer- 
tainly spend a powerful lot of time and work 
and money in keeping up these charities and 
amusements for the poor ; but I don't see any 
signs that the poor love the rich any more, nor 
that there's any less danger but that some day 
they'll rise up in war against society. 

" It seems to me that a good deal of all this 
time, and labor, and money, and a good deal 
more besides, might be better spent in provid- 
ing that no child among the poor grows up with- 
out proper education, technical education in 
useful trades; especially, I think, in scientific 
farming. 

" If the rich lived simpler and less showy, the 
poor wouldn't envy them as much, nor feel as 
bitter against society, and the money that was 
saved could be pretty well invested in kinds of 
education that would cure poverty and destitu- 
tion by preventing them, and the people that 
would be thrown out of work by the economies 
of the rich might be a good deal better em- 



A FAKM HAND 177 

ployed in more productive work. It seems a 
pity, anyway, to keep people at practically use- 
less labor, when the brains and the money that 
keep them employed in that way might be used 
in keeping them at productive labor, and it's all 
the greater pity as long as there's bitter want in 
the world for the necessaries of life." 

This, in substance, is what he said. I apolo- 
gize for the injustice of the account, its vague- 
ness in contrast with his clearness, its circumlo- 
cutions in contrast with his crisp sententiousness, 
its weakened renderings of his vigorous forms of 
native speech ; but I have tried to suggest it all, 
and to give the sense of its manly, wholesome 
spirit. 

Under the stars we sat talking until nearly 
midnight, and, quite inevitably, we launched 
upon the subject of religion. Mr. Hill appeared 
curiously apathetic, I thought, as I urged what 
seemed to me vital. And when, at the end, he 
narrowed it all to the single inquiry as to 
whether I believed in a real recognition in some 
future life among those who have loved one 
another here, I found myself wondering, with 
a feeling of disappointment, at so wide a drift 
from essentials, on the part of a mind which had 
impressed me as so natively clear and strong. 
I looked up in my surprise. Even in the star- 
12 



178 THE WOEKERS 

light I could see the tears, and from a single 
halting sentence, I got the hint of a daughter 
dead in early childhood, and of a sorrow too 
deep for human speech, and of an eager ques- 
tioning of the future that was the soul's one 
great desire. 

" For now we see through a glass, darkly ; but 
then face to face; now I know in part, but then 
shall I know even as also I am known," was all 
that I could say to him, and I went to bed pity- 
ing myself for my shallow judgment, and my 
ignorance of life. 



CHAPTEE VI 

IN A LOGGING CAMP 

Fitz- Adams's Camp, English Centre, Lycoming 
County, Pa., Tuesday, October 27, 1891. 

In spite of the fast-falling rain, Fitz- Adams, 
the boss, ordered us up at half-past four, as 
usual, this morning; but when breakfast was 
over, the rain was too heavy to admit of our 
going to work. Some of the woodsmen are gone 
back to bed, and some are mending their clothes 
in the loft, and the rest of the gang are loafing 
in the " lobby," smoking, and playing what they 
call " High, low, Jafck and the game," except 
Mike, a superb young Irishman, who, seated on 
a bench, with his back braced against the win- 
dow-sill, is reading a worn paper copy of one of 
the Duchess's novels, which is the only book 
that I have so far seen in the camp. Jennie, 
the head-cook and housekeeper, has given me 
leave to write at one of the long tables where 
the gang is fed. 

It is a relief sometimes to get away from the 
men. There may be ennui that is more soul- 

179 



180 THE WORKERS 

destroying, but I have never known any that 
caused such evidently acute suffering as the 
form which seizes upon workingmen of my 
class in hours of enforced idleness. When the 
day's work is done, they take their rest as a 
matter of course, and enjoy it. But a day like 
this, which lays them off from work, and shuts 
them within doors, furnishes awful evidence of 
the poverty of their lives. Most of the men 
here can read, but not to one of them is reading 
a resource. The men at play are in blasphemous 
ill-temper over the cards, and are, apparently, 
on the brink of blows, while Mike is laboriously 
spelling his way through a page, and nervously 
squirming in an effort to find a comfortable seat. 
And I know, from the experience of Sundays, in 
what humor the men will come down to dinner 
from the loft, to face an afternoon of eternal 
length to them, which, in some way, must be 
lived through. 

I note the contrast with their normal selves 
the more, because, as a body of workmen, this 
is much the most wholesomely happy company 
which I have so far fallen in with. We are 
about twenty in number, a curiously assorted 
crew, all bred to the roughest life. Far up in 
the mountains, miles from any settlement, we 
live the healthful life of a lumber camp, working 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 181 

from starlight to starlight ; breathing the moun- 
tain-air, keen with the frosty vigor of autumn, 
and fragrant of pine and hemlock ; eating raven- 
ously the plain, well-cooked food which is served 
to us, now in the camp and now on the mountain- 
side, where we sit among the newly stripped 
logs ; sleeping deeply at night in closely crowded 
beds in the cabin-loft, where the wind sweeps 
freely from end to end through the gaping chinks 
between the logs, and where, on rising, we some- 
times slip out of bed upon a carpeting of snow. 
This is the life which these men know and which 
half-unconsciously they love, breaking from it 
at times, in a passion of discontent, and spend- 
ing the earnings of months in a short, wild aban- 
don of debauch, but always coming back again, 
remorseful, ashamed to meet the faces of the 
other men, yet reviving as by miracle under the 
touch of their native life. They charm you with 
their freedom of spirit, and their rude sturdi- 
ness of character, until you find your heart 
warming to them with a real affection, and feel- 
ing for them the intimate pain of personal sor- 
row at sight of their cruel limitations. Away 
from their work, their one notion of the neces- 
sary accompaniment to leisure is money ; and 
possessed of time and treasure, their first in- 
stinctive reach is after liquor and lust. 



182 THE WORKERS 

Even now as Fitz- Adams and his brother, in 
yellow oil-cloth coats and wide tarpaulins, set 
out through the pouring rain in an open rig for 
English Centre, there is a chorus of voices from 
the door and windows of the cabin, shouting 
to them to bring back whiskey and plenty of it. 
If they do, and the rain continues, only God 
knows what the camp will be to-night. 

It is sixty miles, I should judge, from Pleas- 
ant Hill to Williamsport, and it proved a two 
days' march. Although the distance covered 
must have been about the same on both days, 
the difference that they each presented in act- 
ual experience of the journey was of the kind- 
of contrast which a wayfarer must expect. 

Monday was a faultless autumn day. The air 
was quick, and the roads were in good condition, 
and I was feeling fit, and was " passing rich " 
with three dollars and seventy-five cents, the 
wages of five days on the farm. 

The region through which I walked was typi- 
cal of the open country of the Middle States. 
Over its rolling surface was the varied arrange- 
ment of wood and field and pasture-land, with 
the farmers' houses and barns attesting separate 
possession. There were frequent brooks and 
narrow winding country roads ; roads lined with 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 183 

zigzag rail fences and loose stone walls, along 
which dwarfed birches grew, and elderberry 
bushes, and sumach, with wild grape-vines and 
clematis creeping on the walls; while in the 
coarse turf on the banks, there blossomed im- 
mortelles, and purple aster, and golden-rod. 

Mr. Hill had given me clear directions. At 
the post-office of Irish Lane I turned sharply 
toward Marshall's Hollow, and passed on the way 
a camp-meeting ground, where deep in the shad- 
ows of a grove stood numbers of rough wooden 
huts ; grouped in chance community, and little 
suggesting in the weird stillness of desertion, 
the sounds of revival worship, with which they 
are made to ring through a part of every sum- 
mer. At Harveyville I turned abruptly up the 
hillside in the direction of Cambra. It was high 
noon when I reached that village, and I was but 
a few miles beyond it, on the way to Benton, 
when I stopped to get something to eat. It 
was the evident poverty of the house where I 
stopped that interested me. I knew that there 
was no hope of earning a meal at such a place, 
but I could pay for what I ate, and I was sure 
of being less of an annoyance there than at some 
well-to-do farmer' s house. 

The cottage was an unpainted wooden shell, 
and, like it, the corn-crib and pig-pen and little 



184 THE WORKERS 

barn beyond seemed tottering to a fall. Faded 
leaves of a woodbine, that climbed upon the cot- 
tage, were thick about the door-way, and lay 
strewn by the wind upon the bare floor within. 
There was but one room on the ground floor, and 
a stove and a sewing-machine and a small wood- 
en chest were all its furniture. I knocked at the 
open door. Through an opposite one, com- 
municating with a lean-to, a woman appeared. 
She was large and muscular, but in her face was 
the sickly pallor of ill-nourishment, and her hair 
was dishevelled, and the loose, ragged dress 
which she wore was covered with dark, greasy 
stains. 

I asked for bread and milk; she explained 
that the family had just finished dinner, but that 
she could give me something, if I would wait, 
and she invited me to a seat on the chest. 

I drew from my pack an unfinished newspa- 
per, and as I read I could feel innumerable eyes 
upon me. Through the cracks in the door, and 
the ragged breaks in the plaster, came the in- 
quisitive gaze of children's eyes, and I could 
hear their eager whispers as a swarm of chil- 
dren crowded one another for possession of the 
best peep-holes. 

Their mother asked me in, and set before me, 
on a table littered with remnants of dinner, a 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 185 

pitcher of fresh milk and some huge slices of 
coarse bread, a large yellow bowl, and a pewter 
tablespoon. The children stared at me as I ate, 
and I tried to form an accurate estimate of their 
number, but despaired w T hen, after I thought 
that I had distinguished eight, I found my esti- 
mate upset by sudden apparitions of faces hith- 
erto unrecognized. The oldest child seemed 
not more than twelve, and the youngest lay 
asleep in a cradle near the stove, where its 
mother could rock it as she worked. They all 
were as ragged and dirty as the children of the 
slums, but they had nothing of the vivacity of 
these, nor of the quick adjustment to changing 
circumstances which gives to children, bred 
upon the street, their first hold upon your in- 
terest. 

Stolid and wide-eyed they stood about the 
room, intently watching me, moving here and 
there for new points of view ; until their mother, 
who had showed no wish to talk as she washed 
the dishes, now broke the silence with a sounding 
cuff upon the ear of a little boy, as, with a loud 
command, she sent him sobbing into the back 
yard to fetch her wood. 

The children scattered instantly, except a little 
girl with flaxen hair and grotesquely dirty face, 
who clung to her mother's skirts, and seemed to 



186 THE W0EKEES 

hamper her immeasurably ; the more so as the 
baby had wakened in the noise, and had begun 
to cry. I grew sick with fear of what was com- 
ing next, but the mother's mood had changed ; 
for catching the crying baby in her arms, she 
almost smothered it with kisses, and sitting 
down she fondled it, and gently stroked the head 
of the child beside her. 

It was a veritable country slum, with nearly 
all the barren squalor of a crowded tenement. 
You thought of life in it as some hard necessity, 
from which all choice and spontaneity are gone. 
And so in great part it must have been, and the 
wonder was the stronger at sight of the instinct 
of mother love, springing like a living fountain 
in an arid plain. 

The village of Benton wore a preoccupied air 
when I entered it. I soon found the cause in an 
auction sale of horses in the stable-yard of the 
tavern. The horses huddled close, as if for 
common protection, in an angle formed by the 
buildings. They were watched by a mounted 
rider, whose duty it was to prevent any from 
breaking loose. A small crowd of farmers and 
village men, all of them coatless and in their 
working clothes, formed a semicircle about the 
animals. The surrounding doors and windows 
were full of women's faces, alive with interest in 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 187 

the progress of events ; and children perched 
upon the fences, or dodged in and out among 
the groups of men. A fat and ruddy auctioneer 
walked back and forth excitedly before the 
crowd, loudly repeating a call for bids ; or hav- 
ing caught one, running it rapidly through 
changes of inflection and intonation, until a 
fresh bid started him anew on his flight of vary- 
ing tones, which ended at last in the dying 
cadences of " Going ! going ! gone ! " 

Presently I found a man who was so far un- 
occupied by the sale as to have leisure to direct 
me on my way. Taking his advice I started for 
Union Church and Unityville. In the outskirts 
of Benton, as I left the village, an urchin sat 
upon the door-step of a cottage, idly beating 
about him with a stick, consoling himself ap- 
parently as best he could for not having been 
allowed to go to the sale. The sight of a tramp 
with a pack upon his back diverted him ; and 
far as the sound could carry there came follow- 
ing me, as I climbed the hill beyond the village, 
his shouts of " Git there, Eli ! " 

The contrast with Monday's march appeared 
at once on Tuesday morning. The clouds which 
were threatening when I made an early start 
grew more threatening w 7 hile I walked on, and 
they broke in torrents of rain as I entered 



188 THE WORKERS 

Lairds ville, with Williamsport still twenty -four 
miles away. 

A tavern gave me shelter, but presently the 
rain slackened and I made up my mind to push 
on to Williamsport in spite of the storm, for my 
letters were there ; and once on the road with 
your mail definitely in view, you grow highly 
impatient of delays. 

An hour's rain had worked great changes in 
the roads. Hard and dusty when I set out in 
the early morning, they were quagmires now 
and were running with muddy streams. The 
rain pelted my face and dripped through my 
ragged hat, and trickled down my back and 
washed into my boots. I was a dangerous- 
looking vagrant when I reached Hughesville at 
noon. I walked rapidly through the village 
street in some fear of arrest, but the storm had 
passed, and I soon learned the road to Williams- 
port by way of Hall's Landing. 

Splashing wearily along the heavy roads with 
that awful load chafing my back, I knew vaguely 
that I was passing through an exceedingly rich 
and beautiful farming region, but my interest 
was all in the surest footing to be found, and it 
was with glad relief that late in the afternoon I 
stepped upon the solid pavements of the town. 

I had been told, on the road, of a laborer's 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 189 

cottage in Church Street where cheap board and 
lodging could be had. From the post-office I 
readily found my way to this cottage, and was 
soon propped up in bed reading my letters, 
while the laborer's wife hung up my clothes to 
dry in the kitchen and put my boots under the 
stove. 

In the morning all the brilliance of the clear, 
cold autumn had returned. It was such a day 
as seems to emerge renewed with fresh and am- 
ple vigor from the cleansing of a storm. 

The streets presented a really singular pict- 
ure. The town itself is the conventional Amer- 
ican, provincial, manufacturing centre, with its 
business portion built up in "brick blocks," 
which are innocent of any attraction but utility. 
From this quarter it shades gradually, in one 
direction, into the workshops and cottages of 
the region of the proletariat, and in another into 
the wide, well-shaded avenues where are the 
somewhat ostentatious homes and churches of 
the well-to-do. 

Long lines of booths now crowded the curves 
about the central public square and reached far 
down the communicating streets. In these 
booths the farming people of the surrounding 
country sold their fruits and garden vegetables, 
and butter and eggs and poultry ; and white- 



190 THE WORKERS 

aproned butchers spread their meats in tempt- 
ing array. It was an Oriental bazaar in all but 
color and the highly pitched jabber of Eastern 
bargaining. But still more perfect as a repro- 
duction of foreign scenes were the groups of 
women who, with colored shawls tied round 
their heads and falling about their shoulders, sat 
on the steps of public buildings with baskets of 
provisions about them and talked among them- 
selves, and came to terms with customers in 
their oddly mixed vernacular. 

It recalled at once the Platz of a German city 
thronged by peasant women on market days, 
only here, too, was a lack of color. The women 
were unmistakably Teutonic. All had the gen- 
erous contour of countenance which approaches 
to a family likeness in a whole race of peasantry, 
but the red of the old country complexion had 
faded to our prevailing pallor. 

In spite of a large foreign element, or in virtue 
of it, I do not know which, the town itself is ag- 
gressively American. The fact that some hun- 
dreds of million feet of lumber come each year 
from its mills gives to it great importance as 
a lumber centre. And the good fortune of this 
form of industry the city certainly shows in its 
freedom from the usual begriming effects of 
manufacture on a large scale. 



I1ST A LOGGING CAMP 191 

In one of the morning papers of the town I 
found the spirit of the place expressed in a re- 
ported speech of a local celebrity, an ex-member 
of Congress. The chief burden of it was the 
note of congratulation to the people of the 
town on their progress and prosperity, as indi- 
cated in their electric lights and rapid transit 
system, and in their growing industries and in- 
creasing numbers, which, he declared, " had 
passed the stopping-point." 

But I must hurry on. Early on Friday after- 
noon, October 9th, I set out from Williamsport, 
with Oil City as my next objective point. I 
had no money, but this did not disturb me, for 
I was entering the open country and felt sure of 
finding work. The road lay along the fertile 
river bottom and then began to climb the range 
of hills which walls in the valley on the north. 
The lasting impression here is of a region of 
most uncommon natural wealth. Many square 
miles of farms come into the range of vision ; 
the soil looks like a deep, rich loam. And a like 
impression comes to you from the opposite bank 
of the river, where the land lies flat to the foot 
of the southern range of hills. 

From such a vantage ground you see at a 
glance how the river, shut in by these barriers, 
could have risen to so great a height in the 



192 THE WORKERS 

flood of 1889 and have worked such appalling 
disaster. 

There are constant references to "the flood" 
among the inhabitants of the valley, and it 
plainly holds for them the place of a chronolog- 
ical mark not unlike that held farther East by 
the " blizzard " of 1888, only it sounds not a lit- 
tle odd at first to hear common reference to 
antediluvian events. 

Presently I came to a road which forked at 
Linden to the right, and made in the direction 
of a gap in the hills. Its general course seemed 
westward, and so I followed it. An hour or two 
later it had led me into a forest, where the 
sunlight was fast fading. I was intent on the 
question of finding work before nightfall, when 
I heard the rumble of wheels behind me, and a 
voice singing a German song. 

I looked up as the wagon came alongside. 
The horses were walking slowly up the hill, and 
a young man lounged at leisure on the seat. 
His legs were crossed, and the reins lay loosely 
in one hand. A light, wide-brimmed felt hat 
was pushed back on his crown, and from under 
the rim the yellow hair rested on his forehead. 
He was singing from sheer lightness of heart; and 
young and strong and handsome as he was, he 
made you think of Alvary in his part of Siegfried. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 193 

"Have a ride?" he called to me, and there 
was no trace of foreign accent in his speech. 

"Thank you," I said; and in another moment 
my pack was in the bottom of the wagon and I 
on the seat beside the driver. 

"Where are you going?" 

" I'm looking for a job." 

" You want work on a farm ? " 

" Yes, that or any other kind of work that I 
can get." 

" Well, there ain't much doing on the farms 
now. I don't know nobody that's looking for a 
hired man. There's Abe Potter, I heard him 
say as how he wanted to hire a man to work for 
him all winter ; but Miss' Potter, she told my 
wife last night that he'd got Jim Hale's boy, Al, 
to live out to him. Say, did you ever work in 
the woods?" 

" No." 

" Well, there's plenty of work in the woods. 
It's a rough life, but it ain't so bad when you're 
used to it. I worked in the woods before I was 
married. I could go out to the woods now, and 
earn two dollars a day and my keep ; but my 
wife wouldn't let me. And it's a pretty rough 
life, only I come to like it. But I've got my 
farm now, and my wife and children ; and her 
old folks lives with us, and I've got to stay to 
13 



194 THE WOEKEES 

home, and take care of things. Say, where are 
you going to-night ? " 

" I don't know. I'll try to find some place to 
stay where I can help with the work to pay for 
my keep ; and then to-morrow I'll go to the 
woods, and try to get a job." 

" I tell yon, stranger, you stay at my house 
to-night, and in the morning you can go to Eng- 
lish Centre. I guess you'll get a job on one of 
the camps." 

My thanks could have expressed but little of 
the gratitude I felt. I shared his light-hearted 
mood at once, and was a very interested and at- 
tentive listener to the narrative of his early life ; 
his disagreements with his father, and how he 
had inherited the farm from him burdened with 
debt, but had almost paid the mortgages, and 
had his eye now upon a neighbor's farm with a 
view to purchasing that. 

He was singing again as we drove up the lane 
toward his home, and was plainly expectant. 
The cause was clear when two children, a girl 
and boy of about six and four, came running 
toward the wagon, with excited cries of wel- 
come. They drew up sharply at sight of a 
stranger, and their father loudly greeted them 
with a medley of affectionate diminutives in 
English and German, until they lost their fear, 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 195 

and began to talk rapidly with him in the 
quaintest German, which sounded as though it 
might be one with the strange dialects which 
you see in Fliegende Blatter. 

I helped to unhitch the horses, and then 
asked whether there was more that I could do. 
There were apples to be picked up from under 
the trees in the orchard, and I worked at this 
task until dark, when there came the call to 
supper. 

After that meal the children were put to bed, 
and the rest of us gathered in the kitchen, where 
a large open fire burned, and an oil-lamp lent 
its light. An " apple-butter making " was to be 
the feature of the next day's work, and we spent 
the evening in getting ready for it. 

"We sat in a semicircle in front of the fire, 
first the farmer's wife, and then the patriarchal 
grandfather, who was almost deaf, and was 
known to all the household by the not eupho- 
nious name of " Gross-pap," and next to him the 
grandmother, and last the guest. The farmer 
himself sat at a table near us, briskly working 
an apple-peeler, while the rest of us removed 
the cores, and cut the apples into small sec- 
tions. 

It was a very comfortable place which I 
seemed to have found in the household. I was 



196 THE WORKERS 

taken in with natural hospitality, and the family 
life moved on unhampered by my presence, 
while I, a welcome guest, could sit and watch it 
at my ease. 

The old man had every excuse for silence, 
and he and his wife spoke rarely, and always in 
their native tongue, but they evidently under- 
stood English perfectly. The farmer and his 
wife spoke English to each other, and spoke it 
as though born to its use, but they used that 
quaint German dialect in talking with the old 
people and the children. 

The wife was a plain woman, inclined to fret- 
fulness, I thought, and she had a certain air with 
her husband, which is not uncommon to plain 
women whose husbands are distinctly handsome. 
She had little to say, but she listened attentively 
to the farmer's talk. 

He was entertainment for us all. Good-look- 
ing, high-spirited, manly fellow — in perfect un- 
consciousness of self, he talked on with the 
genial freedom of a true man of the world. 

His trip to Williamsport was a fruitful theme, 
and no least event of the journey was without 
its interest. He told us of the neighbors whom 
he met on the road, and all of his conjectures 
regarding their probable errands. He had taken 
a load of vegetables to town, and now recounted 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 197 

every sale and purchase, for he had been charged 
with many commissions. One was the purchase 
of braid for his wife's new dress. He was full 
of good-humor at each fresh departure in his 
tale ; but, for some reason, the story of this last 
commission pleased him most. "With high re- 
gard for circumstantial detail, he told it to us at 
least five times, and ended every narrative with 
a beaming smile, and the unvarying remark that 
" I'd have got it wider if I'd only known," to 
which his wife replied each time with unfalter- 
ing insistence upon the last word: " But you 
might have known." 

In the morning he was as cheerful as on the 
night before, and he put me in high spirits 
as, with many good wishes for my success, he 
told me again how sure he was that I could find 
work in the woods. 

At Salladasburg I stopped for further direc- 
tions about the way to English Centre ; and the 
tavern-keeper, at whose door I inquired, con- 
firmed me strongly in my expectation of ready 
employment. 

An old plank road lead me through a moun- 
tain-pass, and along the course of a stream, far 
into the interior. The earlier miles of the march 
were among mountains that had long been 
stripped of all valuable timber, and that now 



198 THE WORKERS 

stood ragged and uncouth in their new growths, 
and in the blackened remnants of forest fires. 

Here there were a few scattered farms ; stony 
and of thin soil, where, for fences, uptorn stumps 
of trees had been placed side by side, with their 
twisted roots so interwoven as to form an im- 
penetrable barrier. 

A caravan of gypsies met and passed me ; but 
except for these, the road was almost deserted, 
and seemed to be leading into yet lonelier regions. 

Mountains now succeeded, on which the for- 
ests were untouched, and which, in autumn col- 
ors, were like huge mounds of foliage plant, so 
richly did the gorgeous hues of the maple-trees 
and chestnuts and beeches blend with the dark 
greens of hemlock and pine. 

At a little after noon I came quite suddenly 
upon an iron bridge that crossed the wide bed of 
a mountain-stream, which was little more than a 
brook now, but gave evidence of rising, at times, 
to the volume and strength of a torrent. A large 
tavern stood near the bridge, and beyond it, 
to the right, was a huge tannery which plainly 
provided the chief industry of the place. The 
village street was lined with rows of wooden cot- 
tages, each an unpainted duplicate of its neigh- 
bor, and all eloquent, I thought, of the monotony 
of the life which they held. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 199 

I went at once to the post-office, and there 
learned that my journey was by no means at an 
end ; for the lumber camps were yet some miles 
farther in the mountains. The camp of " Wolf 
Bun " was mentioned as an important one, where 
work was plenty, and I set out at once for that. 

I was tired and not a little hungry ; for this 
mountain-air acts always as a whet upon your 
appetite, and I had eaten nothing since the 
early morning, and had already walked some 
fifteen miles. But the camp road, although 
rough, was easy to follow, and I found much 
satisfaction in dramatizing my approach to some 
short-handed employer, who would take me on at 
once. I dwelt longingly on supper and a restful 
night and Sunday in the camp, and thought 
hopefully of the work to be begun on Monday 
morning. 

And then there was a peculiar interest in 
meeting lumbermen on the way. Some were 
teamsters, who sat high in air on top of immense 
loads of bark, which they were carting to the 
tannery. Many of these wore wide sombreros, 
and jackets made of blanket stuff in gay plaids. 
Others were on foot, small companies of four 
and five together, walking to the village, for it 
was Saturday afternoon. 

I was prepared for some degree of roughness 



200 THE WORKERS 

in a lumber camp, and in the woodsmen them* 
selves, but there was something in the appear- 
ance of these men whom I met that hinted at 
my not having guessed all the truth. I judged 
of roughness by what I knew of the gang at 
"West Point, and in the sewer ditch at the Asy- 
lum, but here was something of a widely different 
kind from the hardness of broken-spirited, time- 
serving laborers. Instinctively you knew these 
men for men ; and I respectfully kept silence, 
and looked to them for greeting, and got none. 

"When you, a total stranger, try to meet the 
questioning gaze of five strong men at once, all 
of them sturdy and lean, and deeply lined in 
face and keen of eye, there is bred in you a vague 
unease, not of fear, but an answering to that 
wonder as to what you are and what you are do- 
ing there. I was conscious then only of the dis- 
turbing of my earlier confidence in entering the 
woods. I could not analyze the look which 
met me, but now I know it for meaning, reft of 

its strongest words, "Who in are you? 

Gospel sharks we know, and camp cooks, and 
honest Jew pedlers who get our wages from us 
for their brass-gold watches and glass jewels, 

but such a ! ! ! ! ! ! 

as you, we never saw before,," 

It was about the middle of the afternoon when 



ITT A LOGGING CAMP 201 

a turn in the mountain-road brought to view a 
cluster of log-cabins, which I knew to be the 
camp of Wolf Eun. The cabins were splendid 
buildings of their kind. The logs were clean 
and fresh and were securely fitted, while the 
chinks were well plastered with mud, and the 
roofs tightly shingled, and the gables closely 
boarded-up. 

No one was in sight from where I stood ; but 
there issued, from one of the smaller cabins, the 
ring of a blacksmith's hammer, and I found a 
group of men about the cabin-door. 

The camp stood in a little clearing on the 
mountain; and in contrast with the shadowy 
gloom in the forest around it, the sunlight 
flooded this open rift with concentrated light. 
The chestnut-trees on the edge of the wood 
shone like burnished gold, and the maple leaves, 
still green, nearest to the trees, and but lightly 
touched with red along the boughs, deepened 
gradually, until, in the full sunlight, they blazed 
in crimson splendor. It was still with the still- 
ness of autumn, and the sound of the black- 
smith's stroke and the answering ring of the 
anvil were echoed far into the forest, where you 
could hear, fretting down its stony bed, a moun- 
tain-stream, which, in the speech of the lumber- 
men, is called a " run." 



202 THE WORKERS 

I had slipped the pack from my back, and 
carrying it in my hand I went up to a group of 
men. One of them stood leaning against the 
door-post. He was very tall and straight, and 
under his wide sombrero, the upper forehead 
was white and smooth as a girl's. The brows 
were arched above dark-brown eyes, and his 
nose was straight and sharply chiselled; the 
cheeks were lean and ruddy brown ; and under 
a light mustache was a clean - cut, shapely 
mouth that answered in strength to a well- 
rounded, slightly protruding chin. His hands 
were thrust into the side-pockets of a bright 
blanket jacket, and his dark trousers were 
tucked into a pair of top-boots, that were laced 
over the insteps and up the outer sides of the 
legs. 

All the men were eying me with that disturb- 
ing look ; even the blacksmith had quit his 
work and joined them. In the questioning si- 
lence I summoned what courage I had, and 
walked up to young Achilles at the cabin-door, 
and thus addressed him : 

" Is this the camp of Wolf Eun ? " 

"Yes." 

" Is Mr. Benton here ? " [Benton is my ver- 
sion of the superintendent's name.] 

" No, he's in English Centre." 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 203 

" Is the camp boss here ? " [That was a rash 
plunge on my part, but it was successful.] 

"Yes, that's him,'' and Achilles' head nodded 
slightly in the direction of the largest cabin. 
From the door nearest us there stepped an 
elderly man of massive frame, bent slightly for- 
ward, and with arms so long that the hands 
seemed to reach to his knees. He was dressed 
in an old suit of dark material — a long-tailed 
coat that fitted very loosely, and baggy trousers 
— and a soiled linen shirt and collar, and a black 
ribbon necktie. His face was very set and 
stern, not with an expression of unkindness, 
simply the face of a man to whom life is a seri- 
ous matter, and who means business all the 
time. 

He was evidently absorbed, and, carrying an 
iron bar, he w r as about to enter the forge with no 
least notice of any of us, when I interrupted him. 

"I beg your pardon, sir, I understand that 
you are the boss." 

He stood still, and looked down upon me out 
oi- keen black eyes from under shaggy brows 
that bristled with coarse hairs ; and in the deep- 
ening silence, I wondered what I should say 
next. 

" I'm looking for a job, and I heard in Eng- 
lish Centre that men were wanted here." 



204 THE WORKERS 

"Have you ever worked in the woods?" 

"No." " 

" Then you'll not get work in the woods this 
side of hell." 

He moved on at once, and the blacksmith fol- 
lowed him into the shop. I was left standing 
in the midst of the other men, who had listened 
intently, and were now soberly enjoying the 
quality of that bon mot, and were eyeing me in 
leisurely curiosity. 

Again I appealed to Achilles: 

" Is there another camp near here ? " 

" There's Long's Camp, a quarter of a mile up 
the run," and a slight inclination of his head in- 
dicated the way. 

Mr. Long did not want me, and knew of no 
one who might, if I was not wanted at Wolf 
Run, unless, on second thought, I could get a 
job at Fitz- Adams's Camp. 

" And where is that ? " I asked. 

"You remember a road which forked to the 
left about two mile back as you came up from 
English Centre?" 

"Yes." 

" Well, you follow that road about two mile 
and a half, and you'll come to Fitz- Adams's 
Camp." 

The road was the roughest that I had so far 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 205 

travelled. It cut its way along tlie sheer side of 
the mountain, following the course of the run. 
Presently I came to a small log cabin, where, in 
a little yard beside it, a cow was munching 
straw, and in front, a fat sow wallowed in a 
pool in the middle of the road. An old Irish- 
man, who sat on the door-step, told me that I 
was not half a mile from the camp. 

There was a stout log dam on the run a little 
farther up, but the gates were open and only a 
slender stream flowed through the muddy bot- 
tom, for the dam was undergoing repairs. Near 
by was a cabin large enough for a score of 
lumbermen. 

The sun had sunk behind the mountain a 
good half hour before; not even the trees on 
the summits were lighted up with its setting 
rays, and the still, clear air bit you with a sud- 
den chill. All the confidence which I had felt 
in the morning was gone ; it was a very tired 
and hungry, a sobered and a chastened prole- 
taire, that at length caught sight, in the gloom, 
of Fitz- Adams's Camp. 

It stood in a clearing like the camp of Wolf's 
Kun. On the highest area was a long, stout log 
cabin, to which there was given an added air of 
security by an earth embankment, which sloped 
from the ground to the lower logs all around the 



206 THE WORKERS 

building, as a means of preventing the air from 
sweeping under the floors. A door was in the 
end of the cabin nearest me, and a window was 
cut in the boarded gable above. A wooden 
block served as a step to the door, and near this 
a grindstone swung in its frame. On the outer 
walls of the cabin were tacked some half dozen 
advertisements on tin, bidding you, in black 

letters on an orange background, " Chew Cut." 

Over a rough bridge that crossed the run near 
the cabin, I could faintly see one or two other 
smaller buildings like it, which proved to be the 
blacksmith's shop, and the stable for the team- 
sters' horses. The mountain-road continued its. 
course past the main cabin, and disappeared 
among the trees in the gorge. So narrow was 
the ravine, that the mountain rose abruptly from 
one side of the cabin, and in much the same 
manner from the bank of the run on the oppo- 
site side, leaving a valley scarcely thirty yards 
in width. The larger timber had been cut away 9 
but the mountain-sides, all about the clearing 
and the road, were dense with poplar, and white- 
barked birch and chestnut, and the younger 
growths of evergreen. 

There was perfect quiet in the camp ; not a 
living thing was to be seen or heard. I went up 
to the nearest door, and knocked. There was no 



EST A LOGGING CAMP 207 

answer. I knocked again, and still there was no 
answer. At the side, far to the rear, I found an- 
other door, and knocked there. It opened in- 
stantly, and in the twilight I could faintly see a 
young woman in a dark print dress. 

" Is this Fitz- Adams's Camp? " 

" Yes." 

" Is Mr. Fitz- Adams here? " 

And then in louder voice over her shoulder 
into the darkness behind her : 

" Say, Jim, here's a man that wants you." 

There was the sound of heavy footsteps upon 
the wooden floor, and in another moment Fitz- 
Adams stood framed in the door-way. 

I was standing on the ground, quite two feet 
below, and looking up at him in that uncer- 
tain light, he seemed to me gigantic. A great 
muscular frame fairly filled the door. He was 
dressed in a suit of light-gray corduroy, a flannel 
shirt, a dark felt hat, and top-boots, and I could 
see that he was young and not unhandsome, 
although of a very different type of good looks 
from those of Achilles. His large, round head , 
rested close upon a trunk that was massive yet 
quite splendidly shapely, and highly suggestive 
of agility and strength. His face was round, 
and the features full and of uncertain moulding, 
but you did not miss the evidence of strength in 



208 THE WORKERS 

his thick, firm lips and the clear, unfaltering eyes 
with their expression of perfect unconscious- 
ness of self. He was plainly Irish, but quite as 
plainly of American birth, which was clear when 
he spoke. 

"I'm looking for a job," I began, "and I've 
come to see whether I can get one here." 

" Who sent you?" 

"They told me in Long's Camp that I might 
get a job here." 

" They didn't want you, and so they sent you 
tome, eh?" 

" They said that they didn't need more men 
there." 

"Oh, they did, did they? And you've worked 
in the woods before, I suppose ? " 

" No, but I have worked at other kinds of 
work, and if you'll give me a chance you can 
see what I can do, and then you can discharge 
me if you don't want me." 

"Well, there's lots of work in this camp, 
Buddy. I don't guess from the cut of you and 
the way you talk, that you know much about it. 
But you can stay, and 111 see what's in you on 
Monday. Look lively now, and split some of 
that wood, and build a fire in the lobby." 

A pile of dry wood which had been sawed 
into lengths of two feet, lay near the kitchen- 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 209 

door. On top of the pile was an axe ; and as 
quickly as I could, I split up an armful, and car- 
ried it around to the front of the cabin and into 
the lobby. Near the centre of this room, which 
is the loafing-place for the men, was an iron 
stove long enough to admit the sticks which I 
had cut. It was the work of a minute to ar- 
range some chips in the bottom of the stove, and 
to pile the wood loosely on top of these. I was 
about to touch a match to the finer stuff, when 
Fitz- Adams appeared with a tin can in his hand. 
He bent over the stove, and opening the door 
wide, he tossed in the contents of the can, and 
the room was instantly full of a strong odor of 
kerosene. 

In another moment the fire was blazing like 
mad, and roaring up the stove-pipe, and fast 
turning the old cracked stove red hot, but Fitz- 
Adams stood by in perfect unconcern, and pres- 
ently departed in the direction of the kitchen. 

I began to look about me in the light that 
shone through the gleaming cracks. Swift 
shadows were chasing one another over the walls 
and ceiling, and I soon grew familiar with a 
room about twelve feet deep, and which ex- 
tended the width of the cabin. The floor was 
bare, and was very damp with the Saturday's 
scrubbing, as were also the benches which 
14 



210 THE WORKEES 

reacted all round the walls. Besides the stove, the 
only piece of furniture that the room contained 
was a heavy table, about four feet square, which 
stood close to the benches in one corner, and 
directly under the single window of the room, 
which was a small opening in the logs, fitted 
with four panes of glass. A rough wooden stair- 
case led from the near corner through an open- 
ing in the ceiling to the loft ; and a door was cut 
through the thin board partition which sep- 
arates the lobby from the large room in the body 
of the cabin, where the men are fed, and where 
I am writing now. The logs that formed the 
outer walls of the room had been rough-hewn to 
a plane ; and along these walls, on two sides of 
the room, was a line of nails, on which hung 
coats and hats and flannel shirts and overalls. 
On the partition- wall there was nailed a small 
mirror with a little shelf below, on which lay a 
comb. Near this were three wooden rollers, and 
over them as many towels, large and coarse and 
fresh from the wash. 

I found a dry spot on the bench near the 
stove, and shoving my pack under me, I sat 
down, facing the outer door, and awaited de- 
velopments. 

It had grown quite dark without. The young- 
woman who met me at the kitchen-door now 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 211 

came in with a small oil-lamp, which she placed 
on the shelf near the mirror. I began to think 
that the men must all have left the camp for Sun- 
clay, and my spirits rose at the thought of an 
easy initiation into camp life. But I was soon 
roused from this revery by the sound of many 
footsteps approaching the cabin, and the deep, 
gruff voices of men. 

The wooden latch lifted, the heavy door swung 
open, and there came trooping in a crew of fif- 
teen lumbermen, all dripping water from their 
hair and faces and hands, for they were fresh 
from the evening wash in the run. They went 
first to the towels, and then formed in line for 
their turns at the mirror, where the comb was 
passed from hand to hand. 

Fifteen pairs of wet, blinking eyes were fixed 
on me, and I was obliged to meet each searching 
gaze in turn. But when this ordeal was passed, 
I began to feel a little at my ease, for the men 
ignored me completely. The air with which they 
turned away from the inspection seemed to say : 
" There is something exceedingly irregular in 
there being in the camp so abnormal a specimen 
as this, but the way in which to treat the case, 
at least for the present, is to let it alone." It was 
precisely the manner of well-bred men toward, let 
us say, some inharmonious figure in their club, 



212 THE WORKERS 

whose presence is for the moment unaccounted 
for. 

As they finished their preparation for supper, 
the men crowded about the stove to warm their 
hands, chilled by the cold ablution. Chiefly 
they talked shop about the day's work, but in 
terms that were often unintelligible to me, and 
the sentences were surcharged with oaths. I 
watched them with deep personal interest, and 
pictured myself in line, and wondered whether 
I should ever be so fortunate as to find a clean, 
dry section on a towel, or come early to the 
much-used comb. 

The last man had barely completed his toilet 
when the door in the partition opened, and a 
woman's voice announced supper. Instantly 
there was loud shuffling of heavy boots on the 
bare floor, and a momentary press about the 
door, and then we were soon seated at one of 
the two long tables in the mess-room of the 
cabin, and there arose a clatter of hungry men 
feeding, and the hubbub of their talk. 

The meal was excellent. Its chief dish was 
corned beef and cabbage, and there were boiled 
potatoes and boiled beans besides, with abun- 
dance of home-made white bread, and strong hot 
tea. 

My seat was last in the row on one side of the 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 213 

table. The end seat was unoccupied, and my 
nearest neighbor ignored me ; I was free to 
satisfy a well-developed appetite, and grow more 
familiar with my surroundings. 

First of all I ate a very hearty supper. The 
food was admirably cooked, and was served with 
a high degree of cleanness. The oil-cloth, of 
marble design, which covered the table was spot- 
less, and the rude, coarse service, befitting a 
camp, had all been thoroughly washed. It is 
true that the men were without their coats, most 
of them with their waistcoats off, but these are 
men whose work is of the cleanest, and there 
was nothing in all the setting of the supper 
to mar a healthy appetite ; there was much, I 
thought, that really heightened the pleasure of 
eating. 

The conversation ran on as it had begun in the 
lobby. There was much talk about the progress 
of the work, and gossip about neighboring 
camps, and proposals for the disposing of Sun- 
day; and it struck me with swift terror that 
the presence of the three young women, who 
waited on the table, was no least check to pro- 
fanity. The talk never rose to the pitch of ex- 
citement, it was the mere give and take of ordi- 
nary conversation, and yet there mingled in 
it the blackest oaths. With a curse of eternal 



214 THE WORKERS 

perdition upon his lips, a man would speak to 
his neighbor of some casual incident of the day, 
and would end his sentence with a volley of 
nameless insults and hideous blasphemies. This 
was their common language. With no realiza- 
tion of what they did, they flung eternal curses 
and foul insults at one another in lightest banter. 

Half an hour later we had all returned to the 
lobby. The teamsters lit their lanterns, and 
went to care for the horses. Some of the men 
went up into the loft. Four had soon started a 
game of cards at the table, while most of the 
others filled the bench near the stove, or drew 
empty beer-kegs and old soap-boxes from their 
hiding, and completed the circle around the fire. 
Everyone was smoking, and all seemed highly 
content. 

I was crowded in between a lank young fellow 
with dark hair and eyes, and a long, lean nose, 
who was swearing comfortably at a gawky youth 
across the stove, and an older man, of heavier 
build, who had fine black eyes and a black 
mustache, a very pale complexion, and long 
black hair that lay in pasty ringlets about his 
face and on his neck. 

Soon I came to know these two as " Long- 
nosed Harry " and " Fred the Barber." I should 
explain at once that the camps have a curious 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 215 

nomenclature of their own. As among other 
workingnien whom I have known, so here, only 
a man's Christian name is used, but it is nearly 
always accompanied with an explanatory phrase. 
A new-comer in the camp is called " Buddy " 
until his name is learned, and some appropriate 
epithet is found, or until a nickname springs 
complete from the mysterious source of those 
appellatives. 

I knew that Fred the Barber was making 
ready to speak to me, and I was on my guard, 
when, while the talk was running high, I heard 
a voice close to my ear : 

" Say, Buddy, you ain't a pedler, are you? " - 

"No." 

" I thought you warn't." And Fred the Bar- 
ber settled farther down upon his seat, and 
folded his arms, and puffed in silence on his 
pipe, with the air of a man who finds deep sat- 
isfaction in his own sagacity. Soon he returned 
to the cross-examination. 

" Say, Buddy, are you going to work in the 
woods ? " 

" Yes, the boss took me on this evening/ ' 

"Ain't you never worked in the woods be- 
fore?" His pipe was out of his mouth now, 
and his eyes shone with a livelier interest. 

" No." 



216 THE WOEKEES 

"How's that?" 

" Why, I'm working my way out West, and 
my money gave out in Williamsport ; and when 
I went looking for a job, I was told that I could 
get work in the woods. So I came up here." 

"Well, you ain't struck a soft snap, Buddy. 
Jim the Boss is a square man, but he can beat 
the devil at work, and he don't go easy on a new 
hand. This is my tenth season in the woods, 
and I earn two dollars a day right along ; but 
I'm going to quit, it's too rough." 

There was a sudden commotion just then, for 
the outer door had opened to the touch of a 
young woodsman, who, standing sharply defined 
against the black night, regarded the company 
with a radiant smile. He was the finest speci- 
men of them all ; not much over twenty, I should 
say, and grown to a good six feet of height, and 
as straight as the trees among which he worked. 
Through the covering of rough clothes you felt 
with delight the curves of his splendid figure, 
and the sinewy muscles in symmetrical develop- 
ment. And then the lines of his throat and 
neck were so clean and strong, and his face 
charmed you with its fresh beauty, and its ex- 
pression of frank joyousness. No wonder that 
he was a favorite in the camp. The men were 
rising from their seats, and the air was full of 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 217 

welcome, while he stood there for a moment, his 
teeth gleaming as he smiled, and his eyes shin- 
ing with delight. 

There rose a tumult of loud voices : 

" I'm eternally lost, if it ain't Dick the Kid ! " 
" Dickie, me boy, you God-forsaken whelp, are 
ye drunk?" "You ain't spent it all in two 
days, have you, Dick?" "Shut that lost door, 
and sit down by this condemned fire, you ill- 
begotten cur, and eternal torment be your lot ! " 
" Tell us what hellish thing brings you here, 
you blessed boy, and why — ripe for endless 
misery as you are — why ain't you in "Williams- 
port?" 

The smile did not fade from Dick's face, as 
with easy deliberation he took a seat on a beer- 
keg and looked at the crew with answering af- 
fection in his eyes. 

u I'm forever lost if I've been to Williams- 
port," he began. " And I ain't drunk a drop, 
you perjured hell-hounds of shameless beget- 
ting. I've got all my reprobate stuff with me 
except the two God-condemned dollars that it's 
cost me to live at the Temperance House in 
English Centre, where you can get for a quar- 
ter the best meal that any of you unveracious 
ones, you food for unquenchable fire, ever 
ate." 



218 THE WORKERS 

God help us ! it was like that, only a great 
deal worse, until the blessed stillness of the 
night fell upon the camp. 

For an hour or more Dick the Kid sat talk- 
ing to the other men. A stranger in English 
Centre had fired his ambition for the lumber- 
camps in the mountains somewhere in West 
Virginia, and Dick was freely imparting his 
plans — how he meant to beat his way to Har- 
risburg and then to Pittsburg, and so on to his 
destination, hoarding, the while, his savings of 
about sixty-five dollars, as capital to launch him 
in a new enterprise, where he was sure that 
more money could be made than here. 

The men listened in rapt attention, knowing 
perfectly that "Williamsport was the destined end 
of Dick's journey, and that the dram-shops there 
and brothels would get every dollar to the last ; 
yet charmed by his fresh enthusiasm, which 
touched a hidden memory, or gave momentary 
flight to some new-fledged hope that fluttered 
in their breasts. He was so young and strong 
and handsome, so full of life, so rich in native 
gifts that win and hold affection with no thought 
of effort ! One knew it from the clear, keen joy- 
ance of the man, and the power which he had to 
hold the others, and to draw out their hardy 
sympathy. I could endure the sight no longer ; 



I1ST A LOGGING CAMP 219 

I went out to the mountain-road, and waited 
where I thought that Dick would pass. 

He was startled when I stopped him, and 
instinctively he clenched his fists. For a mo- 
ment I had a vivid sense of my physical insig- 
nificance, as I realized how easily, with a single 
blow, he could smash in my countenance and 
make swift end of me. 

" I'm a new man in the camp," I began. " The 
boss took me on this evening. I was interested 
in what you said about going to "West Virginia, 
and I wanted to ask you more about it. Have 
you ever been there? " 

" No." 

" You are sure that there's a good chance for 
a man there ? " 

" It's all straight, Buddy, if that's what you 
mean." 

I told him frankly what I meant, but he was 
still on his guard, and presently he broke in 
abruptly with 

" Say, Buddy, you're a sky-pilot, ain't you ? " 

"We w r alked on together for a mile or more, 
and Dick grew friendly, and I lost my heart to 
him completely. Only once Dick warmed a lit- 
tle at a question from me. Perhaps I had no 
right to ask it upon so slight an acquaintance ; 
but as there was little prospect of my ever see- 



220 THE WOEKEES 

ing him again, I asked him if he felt no sense 
of wrong in using lightly the name of the Al- 
mighty. 

I can see him now as he stood against the 
blackness of the forest under the clear, still 
stars, and answered me, with protest in his eyes 
and in his voice : 

" By the Eternal, Buddy, I ain't swore for a 
month! May the Infinite consign me to the 
tortures of all fiends, if I've swore for a month ! 
That ? Oh, that ain't nothing ; that's the way 
that us fellows talks. If you live in the camp 
long enough, Buddy, you'll hear a man swear." 

His face was even more attractive in its ex- 
pression of manly seriousness when we stood 
on the roadside at parting, and he put a firm 
hand on my shoulder, and fixed clear eyes on 
mine, as he told me, in his frank, open way, that 
he wanted to make a man of himself and not be 
a drunken sot, and that, in this new venture 
before him, he would honestly try, and would 
ask for help. 

The men were going to bed when I got back 
to camp. I took ray pack and followed them 
into the loft, where I found three long rows of 
beds, reaching nearly the length of the cabin. 
At my knock the boss came out of his room, 
which is a lightly boarded-in corner of the loft, 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 221 

and gave me a bed next to that occupied by 
" Old Man Toler." 

I bad noticed Old Man Toler in the lobby as 
being markedly older than most of the others. 
He was about fifty-five, I thought, of slender, 
slightly stooping figure, and with gray hair. 
What had impressed me was his exceedingly 
intelligent and agreeable face, and I had won- 
dered at sight of him as being apparently an or- 
dinary hand in the crew. He gave me a friendly 
greeting when the boss consigned me to his care, 
and then resumed his conversation with a neigh- 
bor, while I made ready for bed. 

The beds are simple arrangements, admirably 
suited to the ends which they serve. A mattress 
and a bolster stuffed with straw lie upon a rough 
wooden frame without springs, and on top of 
these are four or five thicknesses of coarse blank- 
ets and tow " comforters." The men creep under 
as many strata of bed-clothing as their individ- 
ual tastes prompt in a given temperature. And 
the temperature varies in the loft in nearly exact 
conformity with its variations out of doors, for 
the boards in the gables have sprung apart, and 
there are rifts even between the logs, and the 
winds sweep with much freedom from end to 
end of our large bedroom. 

I soon became interested, too, in the varying 



222 THE W0EKEES 

tastes of the men in the manner of their dress 
for bed. Some go so far on warmer nights as 
to take off their boots and trousers, and even 
their coats and waistcoats. Others stop at their 
boots and coats ; and on the coolest nights not 
a few go top-coated and booted to bed, and 
make a complete toilet in the morning by putting 
on their hats. 

There was more than one surprise for me that 
night, in the considerate, well-bred manners of 
the men ; and the whole experience of my stay 
in camp has only served to deepen my appre- 
ciation. Young Arthur met, at Kugby, the fate 
which a merely casual acquaintance with Sun- 
day-school literature would lead one to imagine 
as being unfailingly in store for those who pre- 
fer to maintain their private habits in the com- 
pany of unsympathetic associates. It will be 
remembered that Arthur became, while kneeling 
at his bedside on the evening of his first day at 
school, a target for boots and unkind remarks, 
until Tom Brown interfered. Schools have im- 
proved since those days, and it has been grati- 
fying to observe that a like improvement has 
spread among workingmen, even so far as to em- 
brace the lumber-camps. The momentary ex- 
pectation of a boot in violent contact with one's 
head is not a devotion-fostering emotion, and it 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 223 

was a distinct relief to find no least objection 
offered to a course of conduct however out of 
keeping with the customs of the place. 

There was another surprise in the comfort and 
the wholesome cleanliness of my bed, notwith- 
standing its roughness. But in spite of physical 
ease, I lay awake until after midnight, and when 
I slept at last, troubled dreams pursued me ; I 
awoke unrested, feeling sick at heart, and little 
inclined to further acquaintance with a lumber 
amp. 

But the morning brought a glorious day, clear 
and much warmer than Saturday; and after a 
late breakfast (seven o'clock) I took a book into 
the forest, found a comfortable seat, and read 
until nightfall, with time enough for dinner taken 
out. 

The men scattered widely soon after breakfast. 
Many visited neighboring camps, or went shoot- 
ing ; some walked to English Centre ; but it was 
a perfectly sober crew that reassembled at the 
supper-table, and a much cleaner-looking set 
than on the night before ; for after breakfast, for 
two hours or more, Fred the Barber had thriftily 
plied his trade. 

We all went early to bed. The men hailed 
the day's end as bringing welcome relief in re- 
lease from intolerable restraint. When it grew 



224 THE WORKERS 

too dark to read, and I had returned to the cabin, 
I found in the lobby several of the men who had 
loafed about the camp all day. They were in 
vicious humor. They fretted like children long 
shut in by the rain. They could not sit still in 
comfort, and their restlessness grew upon them 
as they waited for supper, and the movement of 
time was slow torture ; and so they swore at one 
another and at the other men who were return- 
ing to the camp, and who seemed in but little 
better humor than themselves. 



CHAPTEE VII 

IN A LOGGING CAMP {Concluded) 

I slept soundly that night, and was awakened 
in the morning by the mad clatter of an alarm- 
clock. It was about four o'clock. I could hear 
Fitz-Adams getting up in the little chamber 
which serves him as a sleeping-room and an of- 
fice, He went below, and soon had the fires 
roaring fiercely in the kitchen and lobby ; and 
I could hear him call to the women to get up 
and get breakfast. Next he appeared in the 
loft, and aroused the teamsters. In an incredi- 
bly short time they were dressed, and had lit 
their lanterns, and were gone to the stable to 
feed and tend their horses. 

I got up with them, and was nearly dressed, 
when the boss reappeared in the loft. He walked 
down between the rows of beds, laying heavy 
hands here and there upon sleeping figures, and 
raising his voice to the call : " Come, roll out of 

this, you damn ! " There was no 

ill-temper in his manner or tone ; it was simply 
his habitual way of rousing the crew. 
15 225 



£26 THE WORKERS 

I was first at the run, first at the towels and 
comb, and was sitting in warm comfort behind 
the stove when the other men came shambling 
from the loft, their eyes blinking in the sudden 
light of the lobby. 

We had beefsteak and potatoes and bread and 
coffee for breakfast. As soon as he had finished 
his meal, I went up to the boss to remind him 
of my existence, for he had in no way noticed 
me since Saturday night. 

" You'll help the teamsters load bark, Buddy. 
Have you got any gloves ? " 

"No," I said. 

"Then come this way." We went together to 
the office, and he spread before me a number of 
new pairs of heavy skin gloves. 

"I don't know which will be best suited to 
the work that you want me to do," I said. 
" Won't you select a pair for me ? " 

" My advice to you, Buddy, is to wear them 
mits," and he pointed to a pair of white pig- 
skin mittens. "They'll cost you seventy-five 
cents, which I'll charge to your wages." 

There was a cot in the office, and a writing- 
desk, and in one corner a small stock of woods- 
men's furnishing goods: boots, hats, overalls, 
and blanket-jackets, besides the gloves. 

The boss locked the door behind us, and told 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 227 

me to follow him. He carried a lantern, and 
lit the way to the stables. 

Outside it was white and still, almost like a 
clear, quiet night in the snows of midwinter ; 
for a heavy frost covered everything, and in the 
thin, unmoving air you could almost hear the 
crackling formation of frost-crystals. Into the 
darkness of the forest the stars shone with 
greater glory, and Orion was just sinking be- 
yond the western mountain. 

The four or five teamsters and Old Man 
Toler and I had gathered in front of the stable, 
where the bark-wagons stood in the open. 
These were strong vehicles, each with four mas- 
sive wheels, and they supported wide-spread- 
ing frames within which three or more cords of 
bark could be loaded. 

We "greased" the wagons by lantern- light, 
and then " hooked up " the horses. The wagon 
in the van was driven by " Black Bob." Fitz- 
Adams ordered Old Man Toler and me to go 
with that teamster and help him get on a load 
of bark. 

Black Bob, muffled to the eyes in a long 
ulster which was bound about his waist with a 
piece of rope, stood erect on the loose boards 
that formed the floor of his wagon, and gathered 
up the reins, and then started his horses with a 



228 THE W0EKEES 

ringing oath. Old Man Toler and I followed 
after, on foot, up a rocky road that had been 
newly cut to a point on the mountain where 
strips of hemlock -bark lay piled like cord- 
wood. 

Black Bob swayed to the jolting of the wagon, 
but kept his balance with the ease of long habit, 
and swore a running accompaniment to the tug- 
ging of his team. He was the tallest man in 
the camp, almost a giant in height and in pro- 
portional development, and he owed his name 
to his blue-black hair and swarthy complexion. 
He was a native-born American, and, although 
he seemed never to discriminate among the other 
men on grounds of nationality, I thought that 
some of them did not like him because of a cer- 
tain domineering manner he had. 

He drew up now beside a pile of bark, and 
Toler and I placed a large stone under each 
hind wheel to relieve the pull on the horses. 

It had been growing light as we climbed the 
mountain, and now we could see the sunlight on 
the topmost trees across the ravine. 

Toler took up a position facing the bark-pile, 
with his back to the wagon. He began to pass 
swiftly the pieces of bark over his head and 
into the rigging, where Black Bob stood ready 
to load. I followed Toler's example, imitating 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 229 

his movements as closely as I could, but was 
painfully aware of my awkwardness. 

We had been but a few minutes at work when 
the boss came driving up behind us; as he 
turned out in order to pass, he called to me 
to come with him, and lend a hand at load- 
ing. 

I had an uncomfortable premonition of the 
ordeal before me ; why, I do not know, for the 
boss had treated me civilly so far ; but I greatly 
wished to stay in the camp, and I much feared 
discharge. 

The boss drove on for some distance, then 
branched off on a side-road, and having passed 
a number of bark-piles, finally turned around 
with great difficulty, and drew up, as Black Bob 
had done, beside a cord of bark. 

I hastened to place a stone under a hind 
w r «heel, and then threw off my coat, and, getting 
in between the wagon and the pile, I began to 
pass the bark over my head, as I had learned 
to do from Toler. 

The boss stood on the bottom of the rig, ac- 
cepting listlessly the bark as I passed it, and 
tossing it carelessly into place. His whole man- 
ner was meant to convey to me the idea of my 
own inefficiency, as though he was ready to 
work, even anxious to get warmed up in the 



230 THE WORKERS 

frosty air, but my part was so slowly done that 
his own was reduced to child's play. 

The storm brewed for a time in grim silence, 
but soon it broke into angry shouts of " Faster, 
faster, damn you ! " and then the entire gamut 
of insults and excommunications. 

I had been cursed at West Point, though in 
terms less hard to bear ; and in expectation of 
the worst, I thought that I had schooled myself 
to take it philosophically when it came. But I 
had an awful moment now, for philosophy was 
clean gone, and in its place was a swift, mad de- 
sire to kill ; and as the hot blood rushed to my 
brain, and tingled in my finger-tips, all that I 
could see for the instant were the handy stones 
under my feet, and the close range of Fitz- 
Adams's head. 

I do not know what it was that saved me, un- 
less it was the sight of Fitz- Adams flushed with 
the anger into which he lashed himself, and be- 
coming the more ludicrously impotent in his 
rage, as I restrained my temper, and showed no 
sign of fear. "Why he did not discharge me on 
the spot I do not know. With awful impreca 
tions he kept urging me to faster and yet faster 
work. I quickened my clumsy pace to the 
swiftest that I could maintain with efficiency, 
and held it there, careless of his curses; and, 



wmmamm^m^mm 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 231 

exhausted as I was, I yet had the satisfaction at 
the last of noting that our load was on as quickly 
as was Black Bob's. 

And Fitz-Adams, too, found a curious balm 
for his troubled feelings. "We were at the last 
cord, and he was cursing hard, while I panted 
and sweated in my straining efforts to pass the 
bark aboard. The strips were large and heavy, 
some of them, and they all lay rough side up ; 
and as you lifted them over your head there 
fell upon you from each a shower of dust and 
dirt that had gathered in the crumbling outer 
bark. This filled your ears and hair, and found 
its way far down your back. I had blocked the 
wheel, but we were on a sharp descent, and the 
load was growing heavy. Evidently Fitz-Adams 
feared our breaking loose, and so he stopped me 
suddenly with an order to " make fast the lock- 
break." Now "the lock-break" conveyed the 
dimmest notion to my mind, and the boss would 
give no hint as to what it really was nor how it 
was to be " made fast ; " instead, he stood and 
watched me, while, with awkward guesses as to 
its purpose, I succeeded in unhooking one end 
of a heavy chain that hung under the wagon, 
and having passed it between two spokes of a 
hind wheel, I clumsily made fast the hook in a 
link of the chain drawn taut. 



232 THE W0EKEES 

Fitz-Adams stood, meanwhile, in speechless 
anger, enraged beyond relief from oaths ; and 
then the tension broke, with comical effect, in a 
sentence which seemed to come to him as a 
happy inspiration : 

"I'm damned, Buddy, if you ain't greener 
than a green Irishman; greener than a green 
Irishman'' He repeated the phrase as though 
it exactly met the case, and brought him satis- 
faction far beyond the power of profanity ; and 
then he shouted through the forest : 

"Hey, Bob!" 

"Hello!" 

" This Buddy, he's greener than a green Irish- 
man ! " and he laughed aloud, and there came an 
answering laugh from Bob ; and the boss started 
down the mountain with his load, the locked 
wheel bounding and crunching among the stones, 
while he swore to steady the horses. 

That was all of the loading for the morning, 
so Toler and I joined company. Toler had in 
charge the cutting of roads to the bark -piles, 
and I was to serve with him. 

The piles were, some of them, in most inac- 
cessible places. The hemlock-trees on that side 
of the mountain had first been felled, then the 
bark was cut round on the trunks at intervals of 
four feet. Next the bark was peeled off and 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 233 

carefully heaped near by, while the trees them- 
selves were trimmed and then sawed into logs 
of desired lengths, and these were "skidded" 
into piles. From the piles, in the spring, when 
the streams are high, the logs are sent by " skid 
ways ,? into the run, and, once in the water, the 
lumbermen use their finest skill in floating them 
to the market at Williamsport. 

In the meanwhile the bark must be got out 
and carted to the tannery, and Toler and I had 
our work laid out in cutting ways for the wagons. 

Supplied each with an axe, a cant-hook, and 
a grubbing-hoe, we began the work of cutting 
through the brushwood and clearing away the 
stumps, and laying rough bridges over the small 
streams. 

I was delighted at my good fortune in being 
set to work under Toler. My respect for him 
grew steadily. An experience of nearly forty 
years as a woodsman had developed his natural 
gifts to the point of highest skill, and he had a 
marvellous instinct for directing a course through 
the maze of tangled undergrowth and logs and 
stumps which marked the ruins of the forest. I 
was soon lost, but he turned hither and thither, 
with the ready familiarity of a gamin to whom 
there are no intricacies in the East End. He 
had the inspiring air of knowing what he was 



234 THE WORKERS 

about, and the less common possession of actual 
knowledge, and lie did his work in a masterly 
manner. " A workman that needeth not to be 
ashamed " constantly recurred to me as a phrase 
which aptly fitted him. And besides being a 
clever woodsman, Toler was clean of speech, 
that is, comparatively clean of speech — he 
swore, but his oaths were conventional and not 
usually of the blood-congealing kind of some of 
the other men. 

That was a long morning's work, from earliest 
dawn until noon, and the ultimate advent of the 
dinner-hour was hugely welcome. Toler and I 
knocked off work at the sound of the noon whis- 
tle at the tannery four or five miles away. Only 
a few of us gathered at the camp. Fitz- Adams, 
with the other teamsters, and " Sam the Book- 
keeper," who is also the camp carpenter, and 
Toler and I made up the number. The rest of 
the crew were too far in the mountains to return 
at midday, and " Tim the Blacksmith " drove off 
in the buckboard with a hot dinner for them. 

The first work of the afternoon was to help 
the teamsters get on a second load of bark. 
Again the boss forced me to his aid, and cursed 
me as he had done before, only I thought that 
he had been drinking, and there was certainly 
an added viciousness in his oaths, and in the 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 235 

threats of sudden death. But I had the conso- 
lation now of knowing that, as soon as the load 
was on, I should work with Toler for the rest of 
the day. Toler did not curse ine, although it was 
impossible for him to wholly conceal the slender 
regard in which he held a man who never before 
had seen a grubbing-hoe, nor a cant-hook, and 
who handled an axe about as effectively as a girl 
throws a stone, and to whom the woods were a 
hopeless labyrinth. But Toler had the instincts 
of a gentleman ; for all his want of respect for 
a man so ignorant as I, it was clear that there 
was not a little patient compassion in the feeling 
which he bore me, and he was at pains to teach 
me, and he eagerly encouraged any sign of im- 
provement on my part. 

But this time I was not done with Fitz- Adams 
when the afternoon's load was on. Toler and I 
soon needed a crowbar, and he sent me to fetch 
one from the blacksmith's shop. 

Near the shop there is a depression in the 
road, and there the soil is somewhat soft. Much 
noise was coming from that quarter; and as I 
neared it I could see that Black Bob's wheels 
were fast in the mud, and that the boss's load was 
drawn close up behind and blocked. 

Black Bob was on the ground beside his team, 
his reins in hand, and with frantic oaths he was 



236 THE WORKERS 

urging his horses to their utmost strength. Fitz- 
Adams stood by and watched ; but at sight of 
the weakening brutes, he quickly unbolted his 
own whiffle-trees, and driving his team ahead, 
made fast to the tongue of Black Bob's wagon. 
Then both together they started up their horses, 
lashing them with the far-reaching leather thongs 
that swung from the short stocks which they 
carried, and joining in a chorus of furious curses. 
Slowly the great wheels began to rise from the 
deep grooves in which they had settled ; but in 
another minute, as the strength of the horses 
failed, the wheels sunk surely back again. Fitz- 
Adams was beside himself with rage, and at that 
moment he caught sight of me. 

" What are you doing here? " he shouted with 
an oath. 

" Toler sent me for a crowbar." 

" He did, did he ? Then 111 send you to hell ! " 
and with that he seized an axe which lay near, 
and swinging it above his head, he rushed at me. 
It was a menacing figure that he made, with 
the axe held aloft by his giant arms, his eyes 
flashing, and his nostrils dilating with the child- 
ish passion which mastered him ; but he was as 
harmless as a child at any show of fearlessness, 
and there was the oddest anticlimax in his mild 
command to " get that damn crowbar and hurry 






IN A LOGGING CAMP 237 

back to Toler," which I was glad enough to do ; 
for my part was a mere pretence of courage ; in 
reality I felt scared out of a year's growth, and 
my legs were trembling violently. 

Through the following days there was little 
variation for Toler and me in the programme of 
work. We loaded bark until the teamsters were 
off, and then cut ways to the piles. 

There is, however, an incident of Tuesday 
morning which will linger in my memory. It 
was the fulfilment of Dick the Kid's prophecy. 
I heard a man swear. 

The boss anticipated the usual time of the 
morning cursing, and gave me an initial one 
that day in the dark in front of the stables, while 
the teamsters stood by with their lanterns in 
hand, and listened critically with sober faces, as 
though they were determining, with a nice sense 
of the possible, whether Fitz- Adams was doing 
himself justice. At the last he turned to them : 

" Will I kill him now, or let him live one day 
more ? " 

"Let the damn dog live," came from Black 
Bob. 

"Then you'll take him," said the boss, "and 
dray out that bark." So Black Bob and I set off 
in company. 

I was not a little perplexed by the puerility 



238 THE W0EKEKS 

of Fitz- Adams's rage. It seemed singularly out 
of keeping with the sturdy manliness of the fel- 
low. If he wished to get rid of me, why did 
he not discharge me ? I began to suspect that 
the cause lay in tenderness of heart, of which he 
was secretly ashamed. To him I was avis rara 
in a lumber-camp. No doubt he thought me 
some hitherto unknown species of immigrant; 
and being too tender-hearted to assume the re- 
sponsibility of turning me adrift, he hoped to 
frighten me away. Black Bob soon puzzled me 
almost as much. He was driving the dray, which 
is a rude, low sledge, used to draw out bark from 
points that are inaccessible to the wagons. We 
were walking together at the side of the road, 
and neither of us spoke. Presently Bob stopped 
his horses to give them breath, and then he 
turned to me. His speech was halting, and there 
was an uncomfortable, apologetic quality in his 
voice, but the feeling was evidently sincere. To 
my surprise he was bidding me, with utmost 
kindness, not to mind Fitz- Adams's curses, and 
he added that the boss meant nothing by them, 
that he really knew no better. It seemed to me 
an act of truest friendliness on Black Bob's part, 
involving charity and moral courage of high or- 
der, and I was far more grateful than my ac- 
knowledgment implied. It produced a comfort- 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 239 

able elation, which lasted while we got on a 
towering load of bark in silence in the earliest 
dawn, and started for the road. "We had almost 
reached it, and the horses were pulling hard, 
when, with the suddenness of a pistol-shot, the 
dray came sharply against the stump of a stub- 
born sapling that rose unseen in the way, and in 
an instant the horses were plunging forward in 
broken harness, and half the load was sliding 
gently to the ground. 

Black Bob brought the horses to a stand, and 
then stood still himself. I was filled with ad- 
miration for his self-control, for I dreamt that 
he was making a successful effort to restrain 
himself. In reality he was summoning all his 
powers ; and in another moment, with face up- 
lifted to the pale stars, he broke forth in blas- 
phemies so hellish, that for the next full minute 
I might have been listening to the outcries of a 
tormented fiend, held tight in the grip of re- 
morseless agony. 

Thursday morning brought the crisis in the 
history of my stay in camp. In the course of 
the midday cursing of the day before, Fitz- 
Adams told me that he was giving me my last 
chance. I tried hard to show my fitness for the 
place, and our load was the first to start for the 
tannery; but to all appearances Fitz- Adams 



240 THE WOEKEES 

was not placated. I thought that the last hour 
of my stay in camp was surely come, and with a 
heavy heart I began to plan the next move. 
But for some reason nothing further was said 
to me about leaving, and Thursday morning 
found me again helping the boss. 
. His mood had strangely changed ; it was very 
early, and the skies were overcast, and in the 
clouded twilight we could scarcely see to do our 
work. Fitz- Adams seemed to be in no hurry ; 
he was silent, and moved nervously. I won- 
dered what this might portend, and braced my- 
self for finality. It was very hard. I was 
learning to know the men; they ignored me 
still, but I was sure that I understood them 
better, and my liking for them grew each day, 
and earnestly I wished to stay, in the hope of 
winning a footing in the camp, and some terms 
of fellowship with the men . 

Fitz- Adams had stopped working now, and he 
stood leaning on the rigging as he spoke to me. 
There was a mildness in his tone and a tentative 
expectancy, as though an uncomfortable suspicion 
had dawned upon him, and he feared to verify it. 

" Say, Buddy, have you ever been to school ? " 

"Yes," I said. 

There was silence for a minute, and the tone 
in which Fitz- Adams broke it was awestruck. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 241 

11 Say, Buddy, have you got a education ? " 

" I've had good advantages." 

And then eagerly from him : 

" Major, can you figure ? " 

It was my inning now, and I liked it, and I 
was guilty of saying that, within narrow limits, 
I could. 

" Will you do my accounts for me, Major ? " 

" I will, with pleasure." 

Fitz- Adams drew a deep breath, and his voice 
fell to a lower tone. 

"Well, that'll be a good thing for me. I 
never had no schooling, and Sam the Book- 
keeper, he don't seem to know much more'n me. 
I guess I lost pretty nigh on to two thousand 
dollars on my contracts last year, on account of 
not knowing how to figure. Say, Major, this 
is pretty hard work for you ; you suit yourself 
about this work, and help me with the accounts. 
Of course, I — I — I — didn't know " 

" Oh, drop it, Fitz- Adams ! " I said. " We 
understand each other. I'll be glad to look 
after the accounts as long as I stay ; but it's 
growing light now, and let's get on this load." 

And so I won a place in the camp, and got 

myself on human terms with the boss. Fitz- 

Adams never referred to the matter again, but 

treated me in a perfectly manly, straightforward 
16 



242 THE WORKERS 

way, taking patiently my clumsy work as a 
woodsman, and accepting, as a matter of course, 
my help with the accounts, and even consulting 
me, at times, in certain details of the work. It 
was one of these consultations which brought a 
rare opportunity. 

I had won my way with the boss, not by virt- 
ue of an education, but actually upon the basis 
of an acquaintance with elementary arithmetic. 
"When I came to look at the accounts, it was not 
a question of book-keeping that was involved, but 
simple addition and multiplication and division, 
in all of which branches both Fitz- Adams and 
Sam the Book-keeper were lamentably weak, so 
weak, in fact, that they felt no real confidence in 
their results. 

But my way with the men was yet to make. 
They were not uncivil, but they would none of 
me. To them I was still an outsider, " an in- 
harmonious figure in their club," and, whatever 
may have been the change in my relations with 
the boss, the men were in no way bound to rec- 
ognize me. 

One morning Fitz- Adams and I stood together 
in his rig, as he was driving up the " corduroy 
road " to the place on the mountain where the 
crew were at work. Presently he pointed out to 
me, about forty yards up the steep ascent no 






IN A LOGGING CAMP 243 

our left, some long, straggling piles of bark that 
perched there, like peasants' huts over a prec- 
ipice in the Alps. 

" I don't know how to go at that bark," he 
said with a frown. " Tou can't get a wagon 
there, nor yet a dray ; and it's so brittle that if 
you slide it down, you'll have nothing but chips 
to cart to the tannery, and the man that tries 
to carry it down — well, it's a three or four days' 
job, and he'll have his neck broke sure." 

I said that I would look at it. I was " piling 
bark " now on my own account, and Toler had 
another " Buddy," a big, bouncing Irish Hercu- 
les, who had lately come to camp, and who soon 
won distinction by reason of the songs he sung. 
They were wonderful songs ; long beyond belief, 
and they told the loves and woes of truly won- 
derful people. 

Buddy had early made known his talent, and 
on his first evening in camp he was peremptorily 
told to sing. It was after supper. He was sit- 
ting, much at home, on the bench behind the 
stove, and was smoking. Instantly he took his 
pipe from his mouth, and cleared his throat ; 
then, laying his hands on his knees, he sang, 
swaying meanwhile in time with the monot- 
onous cadences of that strange verse, which 
went on and on and on for quite half an hour, 



244 THE WORKERS 

while the men listened open-eyed, and punctu- 
ated the sentiment with profane approval. 

When I examined the bark-piles I found that 
transferring them to the " corduroy road " below 
was a matter of carrying the bark in small loads 
on one's back, and of having a secure footing 
for the descent. 

On the next morning I took a pick and spade, 
and first cut a series of steps to the ledge where 
the bark lay piled. After a little practice, I 
learned to make up a load, by selecting a broad, 
stout slab of bark and packing the smaller 
pieces upon it. Then stooping under the load, 
as it lay ready on the edge of a pile, I easily 
shifted it to my back and head ; and holding it 
with one hand, while the other was free to help 
maintain my balance, I carefully picked a way 
down the steep decline. 

It probably appeared a far more difficult and 
dangerous feat than it really was ; and with a 
load of bark upon my back, I was more than 
ever an outlandish figure to the men, more in 
keeping with the Konigsstuhl and the valley of 
the Neckar than with Fitz- Adams's Camp in the 
Alleghanies. But the actual accomplishment of 
the work seemed to interest them, and the team- 
sters used to stop and watch me in silence, and 
then drive off, swearing in low tones. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 245 

One evening the whole returning crew caught 
me at the job. The men stood still, and having 
watched a descent, they examined the bark 
piled high at the roadside, and then walked on, 
commenting among themselves. That night in 
Camp several of them spoke to me, calling me 
" Major " after Fitz- Adams's manner. 

It was the beginning of more personal acquaint- 
ance with the men. I can but like them. In 
the fortnight and more of my stay I cannot lay 
claim to having got on intimate terms with 
them. But they seem to me a truthful, high- 
spirited, hard-working, generous set of men. 
They swear like fiends incarnate, and when 
they can, they drink, and they all have " rogued 
and ranged in their time." On grounds of high 
morality there is no possible justification for 
them. But these are men who were born and 
bred to vicious living ; and the wonder is not 
that they are bad, but that in all their blasting 
departure from the good, there yet survives in 
them the vital power of return. 

There is Old Man Toler. He is certainly an 
exception in point of birth and earliest breeding, 
but he has been in the lumber business more or 
less, he tells me, since he was a boy of fourteen. 
There was one important period taken out, when, 
as a young man, he enlisted, and served in the 



246 THE W0BKEBS 

Army of the Potomac, from the spring of 1862 
until the end of the Civil War. He is native- 
born, and has the intelligent patriotism of a true 
American. In our walks together to and from 
our work, I delighted in his talk about the war 
period in his life. His perspective as a private 
soldier was so true, so thoroughly free from 
the towering obtrusion of his own experiences. 
These were almost lost in his absorbing inter- 
est in the working out pf great events. He knew 
the war thoroughly from the point of view of the 
army. He knew the service, and had borne his 
part in hardship and in action with a distinct 
sense of personal responsibility to the subject 
and aim of it all. This was luminous in what 
he said, and never from his declaration of it, but 
in the absence of such declaration, and in the 
loss of self in the large action of which he felt 
himself a part. 

There was much in Toler that rang true, and 
I regretted the more that he evidently pre- 
ferred to talk little about himself, and almost 
never of his personal views. My wonder at his 
being a common hand in camp grew, until one 
day, in talking with Black Bob, I learned a rea- 
son. Black Bob, quite of his own accord, had in- 
stituted a series of comparisons among the men. 

" There's Fitz-Adams and his brother," he 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 247 

was saying, " they're about as good a pair of 
lumbermen as you'll find. But they ain't the 
best in this camp. There's a man here that 
knows more about this business than any three 
other men, and that's Old Man Toler. His 
father was a big lumberman before him, and 
Toler was brought up thorough to the work, 
and he's had many a camp of his own, and made 
lots of money in his time. But he ain't ever 
kept none, and he never will." And Black Bob 
winked significantly, and ostentatiously wiped 
his mouth. 

There is an "old soldier" of quite another 
type in camp. It is Sam the Book-keeper. Work 
on the accounts has brought me into close rela- 
tions with Sam. He is a large, good-humored, 
fair-haired and ruddy-faced American, who by 
no means shows his more than fifty years. It is 
pathetic to watch his struggles with the lines of 
figures, as he tries to add them up ; and the situ- 
ation is really serious, for almost never can he 
get the same result twice. 

He and I were working one evening in the of- 
fice, and had straightened matters out to a cer- 
tain point. Sam was in high spirits as a result. 
He wished to talk. There was a handy expla- 
nation of his ignorance of figures, and he wanted 
me to know it. He chiefly played truant from 



248 THE WOKKEKS 

school, he said, when he was a boy at home on 
his father's farm ; and at the age of eleven he 
ran away for good, allured by the fascination of 
life on a canal-boat ; and ever since that time 
he had shifted for himself. 

And now Sam was fairly started in his his- 
tory ; but the narrative leaped suddenly to his 
career as a soldier. His war experiences in- 
cluded the battle of Bull Eun and the capture 
of Savannah. Sam's knowledge of campaigns 
was not exhaustive, and his most vivid memories 
of historic events were all of a personal nature, 
which is certainly not unnatural. 

From his own frank statement, he seems to 
have been among the first to leave the field at 
Bull Bun. With another member of his com- 
pany he reached Washington, rather worn and 
dusty, but really none the worse for a cross- 
country sprint. 

Once in the city, they were soon hailed by an 
acquaintance, who took them in hand with the 
remark that " he knew just the thing for them." 

They were simply to follow him to Pennsyl- 
vania Avenue, and obey his directions. His 
first was that they should limp, and they limped ; 
and he led them, limping, to certain rooms on the 
avenue, where thoughtful preparation had been 
made for the care of the wounded. Here they 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 249 

were received with marked attention, and after 
having been asked as to whether they were 
"just from the front," and to which regiment 
they belonged, they were put in the care of cer- 
tain volunteer nurses. These ladies, with their 
own hands, bared the soldiers* feet, and washed 
them, and then dressed them in clean socks and 
comfortable slippers, which the men were to 
wear until quite well again. At this refuge Sam 
and his companion, and many another soldier 
" from the front," were given bed and board as 
long as they found it convenient to remain. 

With cheerful appreciation of the humor of 
it, Sam described the labored way in which his 
partner and he would limp down the avenue 
each morning, until they had turned a corner ; 
and then, instantly restored to perfect sound- 
ness, they would make for the nearest saloon. 
They played this game until their cash was 
gone ; then they felt compelled to rejoin their 
regiment, which was encamped near Arlington. 

That was the beginning of Sam's career as a 
soldier. It ended at Savannah. After the capt- 
ure of the city, and as General Sherman's army 
was setting out on the march to Richmond, Sam 
found himself one of a squad ordered to remain 
behind, for the purpose of assisting the United 
States Excise Officers. 



250 THE WOEKEES 

The men had quarters in a large stone build- 
ing, which was given over entirely to their use. 
The work was much to their taste. Every day 
they shrewdly searched the city for contraband 
liquor, and not infrequently they unearthed a 
den where kegs of whiskey were concealed. 
Some of these they always smuggled to their 
own quarters, and the rest they handed over to 
the excise officers. Orgies that were fired with 
unfailing rum consumed the greater part of every 
night, and formed an epoch in Sam's history 
upon which he reflects with lasting satisfaction. 

Most of the men in camp are younger than 
Old Man Toler and Sam the Book-keeper, and of 
the younger set I have made the acquaintance 
of "Long-nosed Harry." Harry is barely thirty 
and already a man of considerable experience. 
When fairly started, he can tell capital tales of 
how he has " beat his way " on long journeys 
through the country, and of narrow escapes from 
the "cops," and of other occasions when he has 
not escaped. Wherever in this country the rail- 
ways have penetrated, Harry seems to have gone, 
and he has gathered on his wanderings a fund 
of curious information, as though there were a 
nether side of things, and he had grown familiar 
with that in contrast with the surface that is ex- 
posed to the eye of the ordinary traveller. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 251 

Harry's face confirms his account of a career 
not unfamiliar with the police. A long thin face 
it is, with small dark eyes set close together, a 
narrow, thin-lipped mouth, a receding chin, and 
an abnormally long nose, which has gained noth- 
ing in point of beauty by haying been broken in 
a fight with a negro at Atlantic City. 

He is of glib speech, and he has at command 
a long repertory of songs of the vaudeville va- 
riety, and this enhances his standing among the 
men. Besides, Harry can read aloud, as I 
learned one day when a stray newspaper found 
its way into the camp. He read with a certain 
swift readiness that held your interest, and you 
soon grew excited in an effort to recognize old 
acquaintances in the strangely accented longer 
words, which were plainly unintelligible to Harry 
and his hearers, while yet the general sense of 
what was read was obviously clear. 

Harry and I sat talking together one Sunday 
evening. We had a corner of the lobby to 
ourselves. Suddenly, without apparent con- 
nection with what we had been saying, he gave 
me one of those rare confidences which reveal, 
as by a flash of supernatural light, the very heart 
of a man's life, and then leave you awed and 
speechless, in the presence of eternal verities. 

It was a fragment of personal history, very 



252 THE WORKERS 

short, and it was told with the directness and 
simplicity of truth itself. He had been married 
six years before. His wife was a delicate girl 
who lived for only two years after Harry married 
her. He was a brakeman on a freight-train then. 
He used to look forward to his " off-day " with 
a feeling, he said, that "made life worth living." 
And they were convenient, too, those " off-days " ; 
for in them he did the washing, and the scrub- 
bing, and whatever else of accumulated house- 
work he could spare his wife. But she died. 
And there was nothing more in life for Harry ; 
so he drifted back into the old way, the way of 
all the men, a life of alternate work and de- 
bauch. 

" Karl the Swede " is the only Scandinavian in 
the crew, which, like the other gangs of work- 
men which I have known, is exceedingly hetero- 
geneous in character. There is nothing remark- 
able about Karl. He is a fair-haired, blue-eyed, 
stocky youth of one-and-twenty, and as hard- 
drinking, hard-working a woodsman as any of 
them. But Karl happens to be the only man 
who, during my stay in camp, has met with an 
accident. It was yesterday morning. The men 
were trimming logs, and "skidding" them at a 
point on the mountain a mile or more from camp, 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 253 

and I was piling bark not far from the " skid- 
ways." At a little before noon I heard the buck- 
board go jolting over the bowlders on the moun- 
tain-road ; and a few minutes later there rang 
through the forest Fitz- Adams's call to dinner. 

I set out for the nearest skid-way, where the 
men were gathering, when suddenly I came upon 
Karl lying at length in a clump of myrtle, with 
one foot extended upon a rock, and bare, except 
for a woollen sock that was bound tightly around 
the instep. What had happened was clear in an 
instant. The sock was saturated with blood, 
and a dark, clotted stream stained the foot, and 
a pool of blood had formed on the surface of the 
rock. I sat down beside him, and Karl first 
showed me in his boot a clean cut three inches 
long, where the axe-blade had entered. Then he 
unrapped the sock, and lifting from the wound a 
quid of pulpy tobacco, he exposed a gash where 
the skin and shallow flesh lay open to the bone. 
The flow of blood had nearly ceased, for the to- 
bacco had acted as a styptic ; and Karl quickly 
reapplied it, and again bound the wound tightly 
with his sock. 

All the while he acted in a perfectly imper- 
sonal manner, as though he were in no way di- 
rectly concerned in the accident, which was 
simply a phenomenon of common interest to us 



254 i THE WORKERS 

both. He betrayed no trace of suffering nor even 
of annoyance at the discomfort of the mishap ; 
and soon he began to speak of it, in his broken 
English, with like impersonality. 

"Fitz- Adams, you know, would take him to 
camp in the buckboard after dinner, and would 
see that he got safe to English Centre, where 
the doctor would dress the wound. That would 
do very well until he reached Williamsport ; but 
he must go to Williamsport, and that was the 
worst of it ; for it would be several weeks before 
he could get back to camp, and then, between 
drunks and the doctor's bills, his savings would 
be all gone." 

This taken-for-granted attitude toward riot- 
ous living is strikingly characteristic. I have 
noticed it repeatedly among the men. They 
speak of past and prospective debauches with the 
naivete of callow undergraduates, except that 
among the lumbermen there is no sense of 
credit or distinction attaching to vice; it is 
simply inherent in the order of things. This is 
by no means a professed creed. Profession, when 
there is any, is all in the other direction, and is 
of the nature of the " homage that vice pays to 
virtue." It is simply in the natural and unpre- 
meditated speech and action of the men that you 
detect this attitude of mind. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 255 

The time spent at the camp is, in one aspect 
of it, a course of training, a cumulative storage 
of energy, financial and physical, against a future 
expenditure in the sudden outburst of a grand 
carouse. 

It has been interesting to notice what have 
appeared to be the instinctive precautions of the 
men. There seems to be an established custom 
of great strength that prohibits the keeping of 
spirits in camp. And gambling is strangely in- 
frequent. I have heard hints of memorable 
epochs, when, like an epidemic, gambling has 
swept the camp with fearful force, and there is 
a wholesome fear of its return. I was struck 
with this one night, when, without apparent 
warning, the customary " High, Low, Jack and 
the Game " gave place to poker, and an excited 
crowd stood round the table and watched ; and 
Fitz- Adams had to go up to the office to bring 
down wages due to the players. But the out- 
break spent itself without becoming epidemic 
this time, and you could feel the relief among the 
men when M Phil the Farmer " and " Irish Mike " 
agreed to stand their loss of about ten dollars 
eacn, and not continue the game. 

" High, Low, Jack " is invariable after sup- 
per, and lends itself with singular sociability to 
the pleasure of the men. There is but one 



256 THE WORKERS 

pack of cards, and only one table in the lobby. 
A four-handed game is begun immediately after 
supper, the opposite men playing partners. A 
game is not long; and at its end the beaten 
partners give place to a new pair, and this 
course continues until all the members of the 
crew have had a hand. 



In looking over this chapter I see that I have 
drawn a very inadequate picture of Fitz- Adams. 
A hard swearer he certainly is, but Black Bob 
was right in assuring me that there is more ig- 
norance than malice in his habitual maledic- 
tions. 

First of all, Fitz- Adams is an admirable work- 
man. To any department of the work of lum- 
bermen he can lend a hand of highest efficiency. 
And his, in a marked degree, are the manual 
skill and resourceful ingenuity which are char- 
acteristic of the men. Only Fitz- Adams is ex- 
ceptional in these particulars, like Old Man Tol- 
er. With them this manual skill, for instance, 
is like the sure touch of a master handicrafts- 
man. 

One morning, while at work with Old Man 
Toler, I openly admired his handling of an axe. 
Toler was standing on a log which obstructed 



IIST A LOGGING CAMP 257 

our way, and which he was about to cut in two. 
He drew the axe-blade up the side of the log 
between his feet. " Do you see that scratch ? " 
he said, and then he swung the axe above his 
head, and brought it down with a sweeping 
stroke. The blade entered the bark exactly 
where the scratch had been. Five times run- 
ning, Toler performed this feat, never missing 
his mark by the fraction of an inch, and then he 
turned to me. " I've used an axe so long, Bud- 
dy," he said, " that I can split hairs with a good 
one now." 

But even more than a thorough woodsman, 
Fitz-Adams is a superb overseer. Under his 
shrewd foresight and direction, the whole work 
of the crew is urged forward with resistless 
energy. He knows exactly what each man is 
doing, and whether or not the work is well 
done. 

His planning of the work and his effective or- 
ganizing and directing toward its accomplish- 
ment are, no doubt, his strongest points ; but 
dramatically considered, although he is perfect- 
ly unconscious of the effect, he shows to great- 
est advantage when he is personally leading the 
crew in an attack upon a difficult situation. All 
his powers are well in evidence then, and not 
least of all his power of speech. You have 
17 



258 THE WOKKEKS 

actual sight at such times of one of Carlyle's 
heroes, a " captain of industry/ 9 to whom there 
are no insurmountable difficulties, no "im- 
possibilities," but who brings order out of 
chaos, by the sheer force of indomitable en- 
ergy. 

With this high efficiency his ignorance is in 
striking contrast. He can write his name, and 
there his educational equipment ends. His help- 
lessness in the presence of figures is hs pathetic 
and quite as serious as is Sam the Book-keeper's. 
But Fitz- Adams is a young man, barely thirty, I 
should say. Almost his earliest memory is that 
of being a mule-driver in one of the mines near 
Wilkesbarre. From this he went to picking 
slate in a breaker. Now he is a jobber, employ- 
ing a large crew, and undertaking contracts 
which involve considerable sums of money. 
There has been offered to him, and it is still 
open, the position of overseer in a far larger 
enterprise than his own, where, personally, he 
would run none of the business risk ; but he has 
confided to me that he does not dare to accept 
the place owing to his lack of even elementary 
education. In this connection he once asked 
me whether I thought that he might yet go to 
school. I did think so with emphasis, and I 
gave him so many reasons for this opinion, and 



I1ST A LOGGING CAMP 259 

cited so many examples of men as old as he and 
older who were at school, that he really warmed 
to it as a practicable plan. 



The rain stopped hours ago, and it is turning 
very cold, and snow has begun to fall. Fitz- 
Adams got back from English Centre long be- 
fore dinner, and there is evidence that he has 
not been drinking. I have consulted him on 
the matter of leaving, and he has urged me to 
stay, and has offered me permanent employ- 
ment; but he says that, if I must be off, and 
am bent on going westward, I would better get 
as far as Hoytville as soon as possible, else I 
may run the risk of encountering roads blocked 
with snow. Then, for the first time, he intro- 
duced the subject of wages, and asked me what 
I thought was " right." I said that before com- 
ing to the camp, I had worked for a farmer, and 
had been given seventy-five cents a day and my 
keep; and I added that, if this rate of wage 
seemed fair to him, it would suit me perfectly. 
He agreed at once, and now I am a capitalist. 
Soon I shall set out for Hoytville, which is, I 
judge, a matter of two or three hours' walk from 
here. Fitz-Adams has given me careful direc- 
tions about the road, and has shown the deep- 



260 THE WORKERS 

est interest in my plan of getting West, and lias 
urged me to write to him. 

The crew are all gone to work, and I shall not 
see them. They were off as soon as the storm 
slackened. All were keen to go, and so be 
spared the misery of a day of enforced idleness, 
all except " Old Pete," and he is past being keen. 
He is over sixty, and has a strongly marked Cel- 
tic face, deeply furrowed with the lines of age 
and pain. He works with the crew, but in camp 
he sits alone on the bench opposite the stove, 
with the overalls and shirts hanging over him. 
When not at work he sits there hour after hour, 
his large, muscular frame bent forward, and his 
elbows resting on his knees, and there he en- 
dures, in the dumb agony of animal pain, the 
torment of rheumatism in his legs. He seldom 
speaks, and never of his sufferings — only some- 
times in comically sententious response to some- 
thing that has interested him. And the men let 
him alone, knowing by a true intuition that he 
prefers it so. * 

After the rain let up I happened to pass 
through the lobby as the men were starting for 
their work. Old Pete was the last to move. I 
watched him rising slowly to his feet. In spite 
of him, his face drew the picture of the hideous 
pain he bore, but through it shone the clear 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 261 

courage of a man, and his eyes reflected the grim 
humor of a thought that touched his native Fflnse, 
and he smiled as he said : 

" We don't have to work ; we can starve." 

I have spent three Sundays in the woods. On 
the first I fled cravenly into the forest, hugging 
a book from out my pack, and the hours flew 
swiftly along the pages. The second Sunday 
was another glorious autumn day. By that time 
I had won a modest place in camp, and could 
hold up my head with due respect among the 
men. I asked several of them whether there 
was any church service at English Centre. They 
thought that there was, but they would take no 
stock at all in my plan of discovery. 

Alone I set out for the village. There was 
perfect quiet in the mountains, no sound of axe 
or saw, nor crash of falling trees, nor rumble of 
bark-wagons ; only the tuneful flow and splash 
of the run, which caught the living sunlight, and 
flashed it back in radiance through the flushing 
air, that quivered in the ecstasy of buoyant life. 
The fire of life flamed in the glowing hues of 
autumn, and burned with white heat in the hoar- 
frost which clung to the shaded crevices in the 
rocks, and along the blades of seared grass, and 
on the fringe of fallen leaves. And I was free, 



262 THE WORKERS 

as free and careless as the mountain-stream, and 
before me was a blessed day of rest ! 

Every foot of the road was strangely familiar, 
but the familiarity lay in an intimate association 
with some distant past, as of earliest childhood. 
There was the camp by the dam, and there the 
Irishman's cabin, where the cow was still munch- 
ing straw, and the sow wallowing in the mire. 
Then I came to the fork in the road, where one 
way led to Wolf Eun. It was a lifetime since 
I had gone up that way, feeling as cocky as a 
wedding-guest, and soon had come down again 
" a sadder and a wiser man." I felt like another 
Rip Van Winkle as I re-entered the village, but 
the marvel lay in there being no change at all, 
except in the Sunday calm which now possessed 
the place. 

The post-office is in a private house, and I 
knocked in some uncertainty of being able to 
get my letters ; but the postmistress gave them 
to me with obliging readiness, and with them a 
cordial invitation to attend the Sunday-school, 
which, she said, was the only service of that 
morning. Her invitation was more welcome 
than she knew, for it was the first of its kind to 
reach me as a proletaire. 

I read my letters, and then went to the church, 
which stands at the end of the village street. 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 263 

The service was beginning. As superintendent 
the postmistress was in charge. There were 
no men present. About thirty women and girls, 
and half a dozen boys, made up the school. The 
conduct of the service I thought intensely in- 
teresting. The superintendent was entirely at 
home in her place, and she valued the oppor- 
tunity. 

When the classes grouped themselves for the 
study of the lesson, a teacher was lacking. I 
was asked to take the place, and was startled at 
finding myself in charge of a class of village 
belles. What their feeling toward the arrange- 
ment was, I could only guess ; but it was clear 
that they were not accustomed to being taught 
by an unshaven, unshorn woodsman, in rough 
clothes, and boots covered with patches. But 
the lesson was in my favor ; it was the incident 
of the washing of the disciples' feet at the last 
Passover. I soon forgot my embarrassment in 
the interest of the text, and in an atmosphere of 
serious study. 

Last Sunday I went again to the Sunday- 
school, and I had my former class to teach. 
Some preparation had been possible during the 
week, and the hour passed successfully. Among 
the announcements was one of a prayer-meeting 
to be held that night. 



264 THE WOEKEKS 

I reached the church at the hour of the eve- 
ning service. I opened the door, and there sat 
a crowded congregation in waiting. The back 
seats on both sides of the aisle were solid ranks 
of men, lumbermen, and teamsters, and tannery 
hands, many of them in their working-clothes. 
There were women and children scattered 
through the pews farther up, and some boys 
had overflowed upon the pulpit steps, but most 
of the company were men. 

There was no one in the minister's seat, but 
the postmistress was in place at the organ, and 
as I entered, she nodded to me in evident ex- 
pectation of my joining her. I walked for- 
ward, and she stepped out into the aisle to meet 
me. 

" It's time to begin," she said, quietly. 

" Is your minister not come yet ? " I asked. 

"Oh, you're going to speak to-night, you 
know." 

I did not know. For an instant I knew only 
that there was a cold, hard grip upon my heart 
which seemed to hold it still, and that in my 
brain there had begun a mad dance of all that I 
ever thought I knew. But from out the tur- 
moil a sane thought emerged : " This is a com- 
pany of working-people who are come to hear a 
fellow-workman speak to them about our deep* 



ITT A LOGGING CAMP 265 

est needs." In another moment I was cooler, 
and a strange, unreasoning peace ensued. 

I asked the postmistress to select some hymns. 
She handed me a list, chosen with perfect knowl- 
edge of those which the congregation most en- 
joyed. The people were soon singing, thinly at 
first ; but the familiar melody spread, and carried 
with it a sense of solidarity, in which self was 
merged and lost, and the swelling sound rolled 
on, deepening with the voices of the men. Soon 
it recalled college-chapel, with the students in a 
mood to sing, and " Ein' Feste Burg" mounting 
in the majesty of that deep-toned hymn, until 
the vaulted ceilings rock, and the archangels 
above the chancel seem to join in the splendid 
volume of high praise ! 

But more helpful to me than the singing was 
the sight of familiar faces. Black Bob stood 
towering like another Saul above the mass of 
men ; and at his side was one of our teamsters 
who lives in the village, and with whom I had 
often loaded bark. Near the door — I was not 
quite sure at first, but there could be no mis- 
take — near the door was Fitz-Adams, and not 
far from him Long-nosed Harry and Phil the 
Farmer stood together. 

I was trembling when I began to speak, trem- 
bling with awful fear, a fear that was yet a sol- 



266 THE WORKERS 

emn joy; for I had vision then of human hearts 
hungering to be fed, and, as a sharer in their 
need, I knew that it was given to me to point 
them to the Bread of Life. 

I could speak to them now, for with greater 
clearness I could see these fellow-workers as 
they were — strong, brave men who win the mas- 
tery which comes to those who clear the way for 
progress, giving play, in their natural living, to 
the forces which make men free, and growing 
strong in heart and in the will to do, as they 
grow strong of arm and catch the rough cunning 
of their trade ; men of many races, yet meeting 
on the common ground of men all free and un- 
der equal chance to make their way ; knowing 
no differences but those of personality, and win- 
ning their places in the crew, each man accord- 
ing to his kind, and his rewards according to his 
skill. 

Such were they in their outward lives, the 
physical life within them growing in living ways, 
and making them the true, efficient workmen 
that they were. But of the inner life that makes 
us men, that life wherein we act from choice, 
and must " give account of the deeds done in 
the body," that range of action which we call 
moral, where conscience speaks to us in words 
of command, there they knew no mastery at 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 267 

all, and, least of all, the mastery of the moral- 
ist. 

To them God was a moral ruler, dwelling 
afar from the daily life of men, and righteous- 
ness was a slavish obedience to His laws, and 
religion a mystic somewhat which was good for 
women and children and weak men. 

And yet deep in their own hearts was their 
supremest need. Life as they knew it brought 
to them no satisfaction for its craving want. It 
was not so in other things; they knew their 
work ; and in the overcoming of its difficulties, 
they had felt the fierce joy of conquest. But 
confronted with temptations, the difficulties of 
their inner life, there they had no strength ; and 
lust and passion mastered them, and left their 
real desire unsatisfied. Here, in respect of 
mastery, they were slaves, and as regards life, 
they were dead, having only the need of life. 

There, then, was their want ; it was for Life, 
abundant, victorious Life. 

And now I could speak to them of God ; of 
Him " who is not far from every one of us, for 
in Him we live, and move, and have our being ; " 
the living God who reveals Himself in all life, 
and who became incarnate in the Son of Man, 
and who speaks to us in human words which go 
straight to our seeking hearts : "lam the way, 



268 THE WORKERS 

the truth, and the life." " I am come that ye 
might have life, and that ye might have it more 
abundantly." "The words that I speak unto 
you, they are life." 

"Strong Son of God!" whose living words 
quicken us from the death of sin and set us free. 
By whose grace we are " renewed in the whole man 
after His image, and enabled, more and more, to 
die unto sin and live unto righteousness." Who 
was " made sin for us, who knew no sin ; that 
we might be made the righteousness of God in 
Him." " Who His own self bare our sins in His 
own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sin, 
should live unto righteousness." Whose death 
was not a reconcilement of God to us, but was 
" God in Christ reconciling the world unto Him- 
self." Whose Gospel is the glad tidings of this 
reconciliation, and we are become "ambassadors 
for Christ, as though God did beseech you by 
us ; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye recon- 
ciled to God." 

And then we prayed, confessing our sinful 
state, our bondage, our death in sin, and plead- 
ing that we might be "transformed by the re- 
newing of our minds, that we might prove what 
is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of 
God." 



IN A LOGGING CAMP 269 

Now that I am on the eve of leaving Fitz- 
Adams's Camp, I cannot hide from myself my 
eagerness to go. I have real regrets ; for while 
two weeks and as many days do not constitute a 
long period, yet time is purely relative, and I 
shall have a livelier memory of the camp and of 
certain of the men, and a keener interest in 
them, than I have for places and men with whom 
my association has been much longer. 

But of the feelings of which I am conscious 
at leaving, I am surprised at the intensity of the 
longing to know what has happened during the 
three weeks, nearly, since I have seen a news- 
paper from the great world. I thought little of it 
as the days passed, but now I am all aglow with 
desire for news about the progress of the cam- 
paigns in New York and Massachusetts and Ohio. 
And then the last word from abroad had piqued 
one's curiosity to the utmost as to possible re- 
sults. Mr. Smith, the leader of the House of 
Commons, I know is dead ; and as I was leav- 
ing "Williamsport for the woods, I saw upon the 
bulletin -boards the announcement of Mr. Par- 
nell's sudden death ; but of the political effect of 
these events no word has reached me. Has 
Mr. Balfour or Mr. Goschen succeeded to the 
leadership of the House ? And if Mr. Balfour 
became the First Lord of the Treasury, does 



270 THE WORKERS 

he retain the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland? 
And has the death of Mr. Parnell brought about 
a reunion between Parnellites and M'Carthyites, 
or is the breach as hopeless as ever ? 

It will be intensely interesting to find answers 
to these questions and to many more ; but after 
all I am sincerely sorry to leave the camp, and 
as I go up now to say good-by to Fitz- Adams, 
who is in his office, it is with the knowledge that 
I am parting from a man whom it is an inspira- 
tion to have known. 






Library of Congress 
Branch Bindery, 1902 



